Issues and Challenges in Marketing to Physicians

What Do Enduring Materials Have to Do With CME Credibility?

I use the holidays to catch up on my commercial reading and to develop incremental plans for the coming year. Recently, I read through the summary of a report by Primed Research evaluating the impact of CME programs on physicians as time passes after an event. Discounting the source of the report, a company which conducts assemblies where industry-sponsored CME is part of the promotional package, a conflcit which Primed admits without hesitation, there are nuggets of useful information in this research.

First, and perhaps not surprisingly, CME has a longer lasting beneficial impact, as self-reported by primary care physicians, for topics relating to conditions the physicians run into less often. These clinical presentations included anemia, genitourinary infections, sleep disorders, neuropathic disorders and sexual dysfunctions. Not coincidentally, these are clinical conditions where the pharmaceutical industry has invested billions for development of medication protocols aimed at relief, cure or prevention. The other biasing factor here, to use a term from statistics, is "selection bias". The study is drawn from physicians who attended assemblies where the institutions exhibiting and presenting were vending solutions to the very same docs who would later respond to this survey. But, despite these qualifiers, it stands to reason that docs would recall, better remember, and better incorporate things relevant to their own patients than things unrelated.

The second conclusion was the finding that 86% of the attending physicians continued to report that information obtained at the CME events was still useful even weeks after the event. Of course, a lot of what you get back in a survey depends on how the questions were framed, who they were sent to, when and with what condtions. We don't know these things, and we hardly can hold it against Primed or any other organization for employing the cover of "surveys" to validate what they do for a living.

But we take as credible the "sticking power" of CME, and we therefore can be confident that CME venues in principle are useful for both patient care and physician education. The real issue isn't, however, whether docs remember something about treating or prescribing for sexual dysfunctions two months after a meeting. The more relevant concern is whether they could have obtained that information faster, cheaper and without industry "strings" attached. Moroever, can they rely upon the information to be peer-reviewed, that is, free of prejudice in the instruction. As it turns out they can, and the solution is what the CME profession calls Enduring Materials.

Enduring Materials are electronic media. They include content delivered over the Internet, as well as by tangible media devices such as CD-ROM, DVD, video, audio and so forth. Once the cost of travel, registration fees, and time out of practice are factored in, the cost of acquisition for electronic media on a per CME hour basis, is at least 75% cheaper than attendance at an assembly of two-days length or greater. Moreover, in this case, there is no "decay" of content over time. The doctor always has the item in hand, either via the Internet or via the CD-ROM et al. He or she can just call the content and testing regime up again for instant remediation. If the electronic material also bears CME joint sponsorship by a medical university or specialty society, the user can be much more confident that the training is not biased by commercial motives.

What I have just said is plain common sense and accounts for the exponential growth of Enduring Materials in the last five years. It also accounts for the trend by forward looking pharmaceutical companies toward engaging third party CME distributors, those with sponsorship links to medical universities, as creators and distributors of clinical information in the "space" of relevance to commercial solutions. To wit, if XYZ offers a treatment for sexual dysfunction that truly offers an incremental benefit, then it could make sense for XYZ to contract for the production of a peer-reviewed electronic course that teaches for greater knowledge and retnention of the standard of care for those kinds of deficiencies. Just by broadeniing awareness, XYZ could expand the market for acceptance of its products and acquire or restore good will to its brand in the mnd's eye of the physician gatekeeper.

The electronic solution will never replace meetings, which serve many purposes both commerical and social. However, they offer a cheap, flexible, retainable, easily distributed and easily modified venue for information transmittal. They also offer a unique mechanism for differentiating one's offerings and brand, particularly for second and third place players endeavoring to secure share of mind in a competitive treatment market.

I will have more to say in my next message. Happy holidays.

Bob Sweeney, PhD, MS
CEO and President
Challenger Corporation

posted by Robert E. Sweeney, DA, MS @ 10:48 AM