SKILLS FOR SUCCESS

January/February 2004

The Recipe for Successful CME Programs


Destry Sulkes, MD, MBA Managing Director, Eastern Region
Medsn

Brand managers now face a daunting task: How do you run a CME program that is educationally effective and ethically bulletproof in an environment of changing rules and unprecedented oversight? The standards that had been proposed by the Accreditation Council on Continuing Medical Education (ACCME)1 would: (1) bar an expert from participating in an accredited CME event if that expert had a prior consulting relationship with an FDA-regulated business, such as a pharmaceutical or medical device company, and (2) would place increased scrutiny and an assumption of “conflict of interest” on any for-profit organization that provides services to CME supporters. Although the language is very likely to change, concerns persist.

Robert F. Orsetti, Assistant VP for Continuing Education at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, predicts: “Medical institutions will have difficulty recruiting credentialed and qualified faculty to participate in CME events because leaders in the field will not stand for further scrutiny nor permit their integrity and ethics to be questioned. Institutions will be forced to rely on second-tier faculty and CME quality is likely to decline.”

The vagueness of the draft guidelines poses additional problems for brand managers. The solution will likely be found in what can be called the “academic model” of CME, where supporting entities partner with sponsors from academic and medical institutions. The academic model is a recipe for success that creates a layer of insulation for the brand manager while extending the mission of both the academic or medical institution and the supporter.

Ingredient One: Key Opinion Leaders
The academic model begins with the identification, qualification and development of a network of Key Opinion Leaders, or KOLs— independent authorities in their fields, leading- edge researchers, or leading practitioners in a disease area. Their work has led them to conclude that your brand plays a valuable role in treating the condition in which they specialize. KOLs are prominent at both national and regional levels. They are likely to be prominent figures within medical societies or academic centers, journal or textbook authors, and local medical leaders. The most effective network of KOLs for a given brand is a key strategic selection.

Ingredient Two: A Balanced Media Mix
The CME process must include a balanced mix of media appropriate to physicians’ diverse needs and interests and designed to have a positive impact on patient outcomes. With the advent of new multimedia technologies, fully integrated programs are now available that incorporate traditional live meetings, journal inserts, enduring materials, as well as interactive, multimedia CDs. These CDs link a physician to complex patient cases with further CME credits attached. Physicians can listen to patient histories, work them up through an interactive interface, order lab tests, treat them, and observe outcomes—all while being tracked in comparison to their peers.

Ingredient Three: Peer-to-Peer Interactions
Doctors trust other doctors. When the public face of CME efforts—including the KOL networking and media campaign—are led by physicians, the credibility and trust factors will be highest. CME initiatives that will be most effective and withstand the closest scrutiny will be those that include academic faculty leaders. The catalytic agent in this recipe is academic involvement, which offers three key benefits to the brand manager.

  • 1. Academic medical centers are non-profit and beyond “conflict of interest” concerns.
  • 2. Their mission is education.
  • 3. Their presenters are respected educators and scientists who instill trust and convey maximum message impact.

Note, however, that academic partnerships may have drawbacks—a given institution will have only a segment of the full network of KOLs, they will require longer development timelines, they have more limited distribution capabilities, and their media production values are lower than those of the private sector.

Ingredient Four: The Medical Education Company
So how can a brand manager overcome the potential drawbacks of working with academic institutions while retaining the benefits that academic alliances deliver? Working with a company that serves as the intermediary between the supporter and the academic institution yields several key advantages for the brand manager:

  • avoidance of conflicts of interest by keeping a visible arm’s length distance from the academic presenters
  • early access to the complete network of KOLs
  • benefits of medical expertise and logistical support from one resource
  • a partner who understands the private-sector imperatives that drive the program
  • provision of a trusted source for therapeutic expertise, engaging content and a balanced portfolio for program design intricacies

Academic institutions are reporting increased contacts from pharma and device companies seeking academic CME partners. The academic model preserves the position of CME as a purely educational element in the brand manager’s business plan—a winning strategy by definition. The grand prize winners will be those brand managers who can rely on the synergy of the profession’s trust of academic partners with the medical expertise and business sense of an effective communications partner.

Dr. Sulkes can be reached at destry.sulkes@ medsn.com.