Pfizer will be providing 50 percent of the support needed to launch a performance-improvement CME research initiative that will look at how well current CME assessment methods work when it comes to shaping ongoing diabetes care. That announcement was made in early May by the Joslin Diabetes Center, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, which will launch the initiative. (Pfizer’s main product lines do not encompass the diabetes therapeutic area.)

Pfizer’s chief medical officer, Freda Lewis-Hall, MD, said in a statement released by Joslin that the company wants to support a CME research initiative because “Pfizer recognizes the value of medical education. We have experienced firsthand how effective medical education can provide valuable information about treatment approaches that may reduce the enormous burden chronic illnesses place on our communities and the nation.” Pfizer’s support, the statement said, represents “a challenge to other commercial supporters to step up and support this important research.”

In an interview with Medical Meetings last year, Maureen Doyle-Scharf, MBA, FACME, senior director, team lead, for Pfizer’s Medical Education Group, External Medical Communications, had indicated that one of her group’s goals after the merger with Wyeth was to evaluate “the idea of investing in scholarly research in the areas of CME and continuing professional development.”

The initiative is designed to measure the impact of both educational and noneducational interventions on practice by automating the collection of electronic data and tracking diabetes- and cardiometabolic-risk–related performance in clinical practice. Researchers will compare these results with those obtained through the self-report, competency assessment, and chart-pull evaluation methods.

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