corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18751

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: Electronic Source

Kellner T
Value of CME to public health and business value to commercial supporters: Can there be an appropriate match?
Email from NetworkPharma 2010 Oct 19


Full text:

This question creates a lot of controversy. Policies stating education
must be without financial interest have to be strictly followed by
industry whilst other providers of education use CME as a component of
their fund raising tactics. Both under the flag of contributing to
public health maintenance via improved patient care. Beyond all the
controversy there is an increasing demand for post graduate education:
flat healthcare budgets driven by an ageing population and continuing
innovation require more effective resource allocation. Medical
education, respectively CME, is increasingly becoming a key component
to manage these challenges. Pharma and device companies still have an
obligation of educating those who purchase and use their products. On
top of that education is becoming an element of product labels and
associated risk mitigation strategies.

The question is, if and how an appropriate match between the business
interest of a commercial supporter and the value to public health
maintenance can be defined. Analyzing existing care gaps in
professional performance and disease management and identifying those
being in synergy with business might be an appropriate option for the
engagement of commercial supporters. The focus of support needs to be
on the primary goals of medical education: improving knowledge,
competence and skills of healthcare professionals and respective
healthcare teams. This requires an appropriate definition and a better
differentiation of education versus promotion. Defining education is
currently almost not recognized by national and regional (EFPIA)
policies and codes of conduct. In the absence of a clear understanding
of professional medical education these policies become barriers for
evolving educational standards rather than giving guidance to
supporters and providers. In order to reduce the risk of increased
public scrutiny these gaps need to be closed as soon as possible.

For avoiding inappropriate influence several components can help
ensuring fair balance by increasing quality and efficiency:

• Involvement of independent 3rd parties (CME providers)
• Educational needs assessment involving the target group
• Appropriately defined learning objectives
• The right scope of a program
• Program faculty and speaker selection by the provider
• Peer review of program content
• Outcome measurement (at least level 3 based on the model suggested
by Moore et al.)

The delegation of some responsibilities to 3rd parties does not imply
Pharma shall be completely firewalled from education or that it will
have to support any type of program without any decision rights. A
component to ensure this collaboration is maintained appropriately is
the recruitment of education managers. Education teams should be in
charge of decisions related to medical education and manage the
collaboration with providers. Moving budget ownership for medical
education out of marketing departments, as often practiced in the US,
will not necessarily guarantee programs will be of higher quality or
less biased.

If the collaboration between supporter and provider is well
maintained, kept transparent and controls to avoid abuse are in place,
there is a benefit to all stakeholders: patients, medical professional
associations, payers and industry.

Conflict of interest: Thomas Kellner has no interest in selling a
service that is related to medical education.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909