Maximizing physician participation in a changing medical education 2.0 environment

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Until a few years ago, medical education was very much an offline play. With the rapid rise of the internet, lots of opportunities now exist to disseminate scientific guidelines, education and CME via a lot more different channels than before: from realtime broadcasting to interactive medical education sessions, digital publications etc. Key advantages are the same as for most online offerings: faster time to market, 24x7 availability, tailored/personalized offerings and lower cost. In addition, physicians decisively prefer this type of “pull” educational content over “pushy” promotion. Finally, with the advent of web 2.0, collaborative medical education (think of virtual advisory boards, ask the expert online etc) is coming to the fore. At Across Health, we cluster these 2 trends under the “Meded 2.0” umbrella.
Interestingly also, Meded 2.0 is not necessarily a zero-sum game: while face-to-face and print stabilize, online continues to grow.

Through which of the following sources would you like to
learn more about specific clinical medical education topics?

An example

One type of eMedical education that has gained traction really fast – certainly in pharma terms - is the realtime broadcast of scientific events. An event registration microsite is set-up, allowing professionals to register for the webcast (invitation can be done via reps, DM or email). After registration, HCPs automatically receive the broadcasting link via email and are also notified by SMS when the realtime broadcast will start. During the broadcast, a live interaction can take place between the presenter and the online audience. After the live broadcast, it is archived on the microsite and an evaluation survey is sent out to all participants.

Figure 2. Example of how a medical education broadcast is visualised
for the online audience

Across Health has successfully implemented this process many times over for a variety of medical education events. The results are so positive that for many customers this form of e-Medical education has become a standard part of their medical education mix.

Indeed, these broadcasts allow pharma companies to extend their reach to well beyond the physical boundaries of a meeting room, thereby significantly lowering the cost per contact (no travel costs, hotel, catering, …). Next to being more cost-effective, it is also more customer-centric. Indeed, professionals do not have to travel to attend the live session and can watch the archived version whenever they have time for it, even between patient consultations.

From one-way to multi-way

The second component of “Meded 2.0”, creating a full-blown collaborative medical education platform for the medical community through which they can educate each other is still a challenge for most pharma companies, due to the legal and regulatory uncertainties around web 2.0. Increasingly, third parties are stepping forward and creating such online expert networks themselves. Everybody has heard of US initiatives like Sermo.com and MedscapeConnect, but also in Europe these communities are shaping up: doctors.net.uk is an obvious example, but in addition there are quite some HCP wikis as well as projects like also biomedexperts.com (with over 250K experts!) and community-enabled physician associations likes ESMO…

All of these important digital trends will be boosted further by the rapid breakthrough of smartphones – finally allowing for true 24/7, anytime, anywhere education and community (example: ReachMD.com, with medical radio and iphone-ready eCME).

In summary, eMeded is arguably one of the fastest-growing fields in digital pharma, certainly the non-community components of it. However, it will take some time before “Fusion Meded” (seamless and consistent integration between traditional and collaborative digital Meded) will be reached.

Written by Beverly Smet