It seems like everyone loves to badmouth medical education companies—well, here‘s a reason not to. The recently released aggregated data from the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education on its 736 accredited providers shows that the “Publishing/Education Company segment, whose 157 providers include all medical education and communication companies, performed at least as well as, and in many cases better than, other provider types. (The other provider types are Non-profit Physician Membership Organizations; Schools of Medicine; Hospital/Health Care Delivery Systems; Non-profit (other); Government or Military; and Insurance Company/Managed Care Company. The eighth category includes 29 providers ‘Not Classified.‘),” according to the North American Association of Medical Education and Communications Companies.
In a press release, NAAMECC president Kurt Boyce said:
- NAAMECC averaged the combined Exemplary Compliance and Compliance findings for each of the essential elements by provider type and found that “our Publishing/Education Company providers‘ average compliance findings were the highest. Our compliance findings average was 96.46%.” (Technically, ‘Not Classified‘ providers did have a higher average of 97.15% in compliance, but can‘t really be described as a provider type for comparison purposes.) “Roughly 10% of the providers in our provider type received the coveted ‘accreditation with commendation‘ for their level of compliance,” Boyce said.
With regard to the Standards for Commercial Support, addressing disclosure of financial, off-label, and investigational information was the most challenging to all providers. Publishing/Education Company providers led compliance in this category, with average compliance findings ranging from 87% to 58%. In appropriately demonstrating the separation of promotion from education, 100% of Publishing/Education Companies were found in compliance.
I‘m glad they crunched the numbers, so now I don‘t have to! But congratulations to all for the good results the data show across all the categories.
