by Jonathan Vatner |
January 01, 2005
For a select group of planners, change is on
the horizon, and worrisome days lie ahead. Providers of continuing
medical education are girding for a transformation in the way their
educational meetings are funded and how administrative details are
handled to keep the education honest. It promises to be a difficult
transition.
“There are a number of forces converging that are going to have
an impact on how commercial support is provided,” says Sue Ann
Cappizzi, a longtime CME provider who currently is acting as a
consultant. “We have a new way of business evolving.”
It’s a new way indeed, and it might well turn the world of CME
into an administrative nightmare, say industry insiders. Some fear
the changes won’t even fix the problem they’ve been designed to
tackle.
Bias-free education
The roots of this story go back to 1997, when the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration released a set of guidelines mandating
a separation of promotion from education in pharmaceutical company
marketing departments. Simply put, drug companies could no longer
fund education through their marketing arm, because it might bias
the education
toward that company’s medications.
In 2001, the Office of the Inspector General began to put
together a compliance protocol that banned pharmaceutical companies
from spending money that would influence doctors’ prescribing
practices. A year later, the Washington, D.C.-based Pharmaceutical
Researchers and Manufacturers of America released the PhRMA Code,
which essentially asked those companies to do the same thing,
voluntarily. The PhRMA move was intended to broadcast to the world
that member companies were happy to comply with the OIG, though its
end result was to add another set of rules to the ever-growing
list.
Most recently, in late 2004, the Accreditation Council for
Continuing Medical Education, based in Chicago, released its
revised Standards for Commercial Support, intended for CME
providers in an effort to keep a program’s funding from biasing
that program’s education.
Providers are just now beginning to understand how all these
developments are going to affect them. Unfortunately, most of the
news is not good.