involved in education in the industry,” Kowitz said, adding: “There is, how- ever, a distinction: Not all education is credential-oriented or certified.”
‘CUTTING BACK EXCESS’ But CME programs are. What do they look like without corporate sponsorship? MCE Conferences offers one possible model. A few months ago, Convene sat down with Light at the Fairmont Wash- ington, D.C., where MCE was presenting
“Pediatric and Adult Infectious Diseases: An Evidence-Based Approach to Com- mon Problems.” About 100 people attended the three-day program, which was funded entirely through registration (or “tuition,” as MCE calls it) — $575 for physicians and $475 for residents and other health-care professionals. “We like to keep our conferences
small,” said Light, MCE’s president, who has worked in travel and tourism
“off and on” for the last 30 years. “We want to get away from the lecture-style conferences. What we want to do is have more case-based studies, more interaction between the speakers and the attendees. It makes it more interesting. It is a much better learning experience for them when they can interact with a speaker and ask ques- tions based on what is happening and what they see at the office.” MCE presents a half-day of content
during each day of its programs — a choice that, again, was based on Light’s own experience attending medical con- ferences with her husband. “He would go to conferences, where it was a full day,” she said. “So you fly to a destination that took you hours to get to. You paid all this money to be there. You are excited about going to that destination, and then ended up being in a meeting room all day. Then at night you go out for supper and back to sleep and you realize, ‘What am I doing here? I could have stayed [home] and done this course online.’”
56 PCMA CONVENE OCTOBER 2012 But while MCE always chooses beau-
tiful destinations with plenty of things to see and do — usually somewhere in the Americas — its conferences aren’t lavish or over-the top. “Our funding model,” Light said, “is cutting back excess.” She recounted what she told an
American Academy of Family Physi- cians board member who attended an MCE event and asked how the company could afford to offer “a wonderful program like this” without commercial support: “Look, you were at the confer- ence for three days. We didn’t have cocktail parties. We didn’t have any big dances. We have two, three speakers, maximum. … We cut back on all the expenses to put a conference together. We don’t have 15 people deployed to a venue from our staff. … We travel with our own audiovisual equipment.” MCE is also going green, recently
introducing a feature on its website called myMCE that allows attendees to access and download information and materials in advance of a program.
“They can print it out if they want and bring their own syllabus, because they are not getting paper at the conference,” Light said. “They get a USB drive.” Light feels so strongly about remov-
ing the sponsorship dynamic from the picture that she and her team won’t even let attendees who are on site for one MCE program register for another.
“We will give them a little bit of infor- mation about the resort and things like that,” Light said, “but more detailed stuff will have to be discussed after the conference. We are there for that con- ference, to service that conference.”
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Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene.
BREAKOUT
A Word About Sponsorships
“I just want to make something very clear: There is nothing wrong with pharmaceutical companies [and other corporate sponsors],” said MCE Conferences’ Orly Light. “I think pharmaceutical companies are wonderful. They come up with amazing stuff that saves lives all the time. There is nothing wrong with pharmaceutical companies in the right context, in the right place. … There are some attendees that are not aware, when they go to a conference that has commercial support, how the information is being distributed to them, and where is it biased and where is it unbiased.”
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› Read ACCME’s 2011 Annual Report Data at convn.org/ accme-2011.