Pfizer recently reorganized its Medical Education Group in a pretty dramatic way, including moving 90 percent of its budget into a request-for-proposal model, rather than one based on unsolicited grant requests (here's a fairly thorough run-down of the changes). Another big change is that the model is no longer going to be CME-centric; CME, accredited or not, may not get a very big piece of the Pfizer pie moving forward. While MEG leader Maureen Doyle-Scharff tells me that this is actually an opportunity for CME providers to prove their relevance to the big performance-improvement picture, I'm not so sure everyone would agree.
First GlaxoSmithKline limited the possible field of contenders to just 20, then Pfizer decided to eliminate medical education companies from their grantee mix, and now this. Like it or not, the grant-making models are changing.
What do you think of the evolution of commercial support models? How have these changes affected the CME community? What else do you think will be coming down the pike? (If you don't want to leave a comment below, please e-mail me at [email protected]. I really want to know what people think about all this.)
