Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16874

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

Mundy A
How Industry Spends $1 Billion a Year on Continuing Medical Ed.
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2009 Nov 30
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/11/13/how-industry-spends-1-billion-a-year-on-continuing-medical-ed/

Full text:

Drug and device companies, along with other industry players, spend about $1 billion a year to fund the continuing medical education classes doctors have to take to keep their licenses current. We may soon get more insight into how that money flows: A little-discussed provision in the House health care bill would require drug makers to disclose their spending on CME, the WSJ reports.

Sens. Herb Kohl and Chuck Grassley have been interested in this sort of thing for a while – and they’ve been the target of some critical blog posts by Tom Sullivan, the owner of a CME company called Rockpointe.

His blog caught the attention of Kohl’s Special Committee on Aging, which requested records of payments from the health-care industry to Sulllivan’s company. You can read the list for yourself – it adds up to more than $20 million since the start of 2006.

One example: As of June 30 of this year, MedImmune had paid Sullivan $342,163 for seminars and surveys on respiratory syncytial virus, according to the list. MedImmune, which is owned by AstraZeneca, sells a drug that protects high-risk babies from RSV. A MedImmune spokesman told Health Blog that the seminars were independently created, and the company had no input.

Sullivan told the Health Blog that “Our CME courses are independent of their sponsors. We propose topics and areas of educational interest and request grants from them.” Sullivan says he’s not opposed to the health care bill requiring drug companies to disclose what they pay all CME firms.