A while back, I had written a post about incentives and how they matter in the care of the patient. I spoke about malaligned incentives offered with certain products which can influence (and possibly wrongly lead) patient treatment plans. You can read it here
It also got published on Professor Kevin O'Brien's orthodontic blog which you can read here. The most refreshing part was to view the comments from orthodontists wholly agreeing on what was said.
Incentivising treatments with statuses and discounts is misleading and makes healthcare product led. Yet, another set of experiences have made me rethink too. I elaborate on these here.
We run high quality educational events at Tubules. Our approach is to view the feedback from delegates, to find out their learning needs and set up workshops that match those learning needs. We then approach companies for support for materials and equipment (or failing that, we buy what is possible within our budgets).
Every single one of our event has this criteria
1. The speakers and educators are renumerated by Tubules (not a sponsor or company)
2. All companies are offered the same rates - and we prefer to call them partners. No one gets preferential treatment for offering more money.
Our ethos is educational led.
Recently, a couple of companies declined to support the workshops. Their reasoning was "that is not our product focus for this year" or "that is not our priority product". However they were willing to commit larger budgets to places which would run workshops that featured their products that were a focus or priority.
More and more companies are hosting their own conferences with their KOLs. Will these KOLs speak about competitor company products being better? Will they speak about the failings of the products that the host company uses?
Whether it is the incentivising of products, determining education by product focus OR allowing product companies to run educational CPD events ....one question keeps crossing my mind... So i ask it - is Is CPD and CE now healthcare led or product care led?