Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16036

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Carlat D.
New ACCME Report: Commercial CME Support Enters Free Fall
The Carlat Psychiatry Blog 2009 Jul 21
http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2009/07/new-accme-report-commercial-cme-support.html

Full text:

Once a year, the ACCME (Accreditation Council of Continuing Medical Education) releases its Annual Report detailing the state of the health of the CME enterprise. It reports various things, like how many CME courses have been offered, how many physicians have taken part, etc…. But the meat of the report is always on page 8, Table 7: “Income and Expense by Organization Type”.

This year, the big news (though not that newsy to those who have been following the issue) is that for the first time since financial records were reported in 1998, the size of the CME industry has contracted. In 1998, the total income for all CME activities was $888 million, and over the years, it steadily increased to a high of $2,539 million in 2007. Well, last year, the total dipped to $2,365 million, a “loss” of $174 million.

Why do I put the word loss in quotes? Because virtually this entire shortfall was accounted for by a decrease in commercial support for CME. Commercial support dropped from roughly $1.2 billion in 2007 to $1 billion in 2008. This is actually good news, because drug companies support CME in order to encourage doctors to prescribe the newest and most expensive drugs, even when these drugs have no advantages and, as often happens, have more severe side effects than older agents.

But the news is even better than this. Drug companies are wisely electing to pull their money out of the most corrupt and biased of all CME-providing entities—the for-profit Medical Education and Communication Companies. As you can see in this chart put together by my assistant who painstakingly entered years worth of ACCME numbers into an Excel spreadsheet (note to ACCME—shouldn’t this data crunching be your job?), commercial support for MECCs has entered free fall mode. In 2007, drug companies forked over $594 million to MECCs in order to promote their newest and most expensive products; last year, they reduced the spigot to $463 million—a decrease of $131 million, or a 22% drop.

And believe me folks, the 2009 report will look even worse for MECCs. Pfizer has announced that it will no longer fund them. The American Psychiatric Association is ending industry sponsored symposia, all of which are administered by MECCs. The AMA, in its latest CEJA report, said that commercial funding should be allowed only if the CME provider is deemed “not overly reliant on funding from industry sources.” Translation: for-profit MECCs will no longer be kosher. (I realize this second CEJA report has been sent back to committee to tweak language such as “ethically permissible” but the language regarding MECCs will likely survive). Finally, the Institute of Medicine has called for a drastic reduction in commercial support of CME.

So goodbye MECCs. Your Christmas and Hannukah lasted a long time, but it’s finally winding down.