Attendance is a bad way to measure CME effectiveness

File this one in the duh department, but I guess it does still need to be said. A new study from Cutting Edge Information finds that:

Fewer than one quarter of pharmaceutical companies view attendance as a major concern for continuing medical education (CME) events. Only 23.5% of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies agreed that attendance was a significant challenge for their CME department. However, attendance is the one metric that all companies track and use to make critical investment decisions for future events...





Pharmaceutical companies must work with CME providers to develop outcomes measures that more accurately demonstrate an event's


effectiveness. For example, interviewed CME executives said that when considering which CME events to sponsor, they look for providers that have a solid plan in place for recruiting. Pharmaceutical companies also rely on providers to perform peer mapping and to target audition definitions up front. Simply inviting masses of people is no longer acceptable, and companies prefer their providers to be as targeted and specific as possible with their audiences.