File this one under "really bad idea": Organon freaked out some Dutch gynocologists–and, more importantly, their spouses–by sending them anonymous Valentines that said, "Now, shall we tell everyone?" Of course, it was to promote a new product, but they didn’t say so until the next day. Let the spousal rear-kicking ensue! Some of the docs were so upset that the company later sent them flowers to make amends.

OK, so it doesn’t have anything to do with CME or pharma meetings, but for some reason I feel compelled to share.

Pharma and biotech meeting planners may find a new wrinkle in their work as more jobs begin to be "offshored" to places like India and China, according to this article in the New York Times (free registration req’d). While the number of jobs going overseas is still relatively small,

"It’s a trend that’s becoming more pronounced as people’s budgets get tight," said Riccardo Pigliucci, chief executive of Discovery Partners International, a San Diego company that does chemistry work for drug companies…Clinical trials of new drugs, for instance, are already moving to countries in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, because the costs of conducting the trials are lower and human subjects can be recruited more easily.

I can see training becoming a bigger issue as the workforce becomes more global, and possibly even the offshoring of some meeting planners themselves as their constituents grow in Asia.

Stephanie Downs at ConferBlog also reports on the outsourcing phenomenon in this post, though it doesn’t seem to address the offshoring issue. One quote from the study she discusses:

Four areas will see greater outsourcing. The [learning and training] activities and functions that a greater number of respondents expected to see outsourced in 2007 included content modification (that is, conversion of content to eLearning), content localization, management of professional learning communities, and management of other vendors that are providing training.

Pharma and biotech meeting planners may find a new wrinkle in their work as more jobs begin to be "offshored" to places like India and China, according to this article in the New York Times (free registration req’d). While the number of jobs going overseas is still relatively small,

Discovery Partners International, a San Diego company that does chemistry work for drug companies…Clinical trials of new drugs, for instance, are already moving to countries in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, because the costs of conducting the trials are lower and human subjects can be recruited more easily.

Stephanie Downs at ConferBlog also reports on the outsourcing phenomenon in this post, though it doesn’t seem to address the offshoring issue. One quote from the study she discusses:

Four areas will see greater outsourcing. The [learning and training] activities and functions that a greater number of respondents expected to see outsourced in 2007 included content modification (that is, conversion of content to eLearning), content localization, management of professional learning communities, and management of other vendors that are providing training.

I just read a review of Marcia Angell s book, The Truth about the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do about It in Health Affairs that suggests perhaps Angell is a little harsh on pharma, particularly the R&D economics.

Unfortunately, the reviewer finds “most enlightening” Angell s excoriation of the pharma/CME connection. A snip:

I was surprised to learn that more than 60 percent of the costs of continuing medical education (CME) for physicians is paid for by pharmaceutical companies. This and other types of support for physicians come from companies marketing budgets. Whether or not educational activities cost the industry almost $35 billion a year, as Angell contends, the chapter has enough anecdotes about company-funded medical “education” to make a patient feel sick.

She also seems to like the idea of more government regulation of CME something that Angell doesn t call for, though she asks CME providers to do more self-policing, which is what I think is a better solution. The review ends with this nice little blood-boiler: “The medical profession has attempted to reform its own policies regarding financial conflicts of interest in CME, but the changes are modest. Surely Angell could have pointed government regulatory guns at her own profession as directly as she did at the drug industry. It takes two sides to seal a bribe.”

And here s another review of this book, plus a couple of other similar ones.

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Here’s a sneak peek of one piece of Medical Meetings’ coverage of the Alliance meeting, to be published in the March/April issue:

Not surprisingly, the Medical Specialty Society Provider Section Meeting at the Alliance for CME Annual Conference, held January 26 to 29 in San Francisco, focused on how societies are coping with the updated Standards for Commercial Support. As Suzanne Ziemnik, Med, director, division of CME, American Academy of Pediatrics, Elk Grove Village, Ill., said at the session s start, “The reason the Alliance is having record-breaking attendance is due to both beautiful San Francisco and [David Baldwin, manager, accreditation services, with the Accreditation Council for CME, Chicago] and his colleagues at ACCME.”

Baldwin began by walking participants through some of the changes to the updated Standards, including the controversial Element 2.3, which says, “The provider must have implemented a mechanism to identify and resolve all conflicts of interest prior to the education activity being delivered to learners.” He said, “While the responsibility to resolve in advance is new, the practice of resolving or managing conflict is not,” he said.

Then representatives of several societies, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Ophthalmology, shared what they were doing to comply.

I just heard from Shannon Peryea, an executive recruiter who has openings in medical education andd pharmaceutical advertising in New York City and state, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.

Righ now, she has the following openings:

Business Development Managers

Publications Managers

Traffic Coordinator

Business Director

Sr. Marketing Consultant

Program Coordinator

Account Managers/Directors

Account Group Supervisor

Medical Writers/Editors

Meeting Manager

Director Strategic Accounts

If you’re interested, please get in touch with Shannon, phone (518) 843-4611, for more information. Tell her I sent you!

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My friend Michele Wiergac wrote this article about the value of informal networks. But why is it that, when a CME provider tries to incorporate special interest groups into an event, either online or live, they often don t succeed in creating these types of networks? I m thinking about the 2004 CME Congress, which I attended for the first time last spring. They offered “learning communities” that people could sign up for ahead of time or on site. But not too many people made use of the opportunity to gather with like-minded colleagues to share a meal.

Maybe the way to go is to tie it to certain sessions. Say, everyone planning to attend sessions on the ACCME s new Standards for Commercial Support could be one group (I know, I know, a HUGE group), those interested in new research another, those interested in learning more about what commercial supporters want from CME providers another. They could get together during meals and have discussions focused on what they d just learned, and hopefully would amplify the lessons learned and networking.

If anyone has examples of creating informal networks through their meetings, I d love to hear how it worked.

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A quick snip from an article in the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge report: "Health care and the Internet are well-matched for each other, quipped one panelist at the IS2K conference, ‘because no one wants to pay for either.’" I’d say that’s a ditto for CME, wouldn’t you? It’s an interesting article about new business models that are emerging. But you probably won’t be too thrilled with this comment if you hold online events:

[Daniel D. Moriarty, Assistant Provost and Chief Information Officer of Harvard University (and former Dean of Information Technology at Harvard Medical School)] also reckoned that another emerging frontier is online continuing medical education. While he assessed the current quality of such offerings as "pretty limp," quality can only improve thanks to dramatic interest within the medical community in what the Internet can do.

Here’s another interesting article from HBS. This one looks at the possibility or lack thereof of credentialing business leaders like doctors or lawyers. Not that it would ever happen, but it is interesting to think about.

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