Professional Medical Education Excellence: Structure and Staffing to Optimize Pharmaceutical Education Groups

STUDY OVERVIEW

Medical Education is a critical activity in the pharmaceutical sector - physicians need to be informed about new therapies that impact the treatment of their patients. In the current environment, pharma education groups are faced with the challenge of holding down costs while adding new programs and expanding into emerging markets.

To optimize their education groups, pharma organizations need to ensure their education group's structure, and staffing are well aligned to maximize resources while meeting needs. Best Practices, LLC conducted this study to inform medical education leaders on current approaches to the structure, and staffing of medical education groups.

This study also provides benchmarks around medical education groups' geographic focus, utilization of staff, and outsourcing of program creation and deployment. Medical education leaders in the pharmaceutical sector can use this study to compare their structure, and staffing approaches with those of leading organizations.

This study presents data in two segments: Pharmaceutical and Medical Device.


KEY TOPICS

• Executive Summary
• Participant Overview Information
• Organizational Fit & Geographic Focus
• Staffing Benchmarks & Program Trends

• Medical education group corporate and professional fit
• Type of structure that best describes the organizational approach of medical education function and organization
• Levels of management between medical education head and the company’s CEO
• Title of the highest level leader of medical education organization
• Title of a person medical education head directly reports to
• Type of geographic responsibility that best describes leadership scope
• Different geographic regions medical education organization support
• Type of approach to program content in deployment of education programs
• Number of FTE’s working in your global professional medical education organization
• Relative percent allocation of total medical education FTEs working to support each region
• Average span of control in medical education organization
• Mix of medical education employees
• Total number of education programs performed during past year
• Factors affecting company support of medical education
• Products supported by professional medical education groups
• Percentage of programs created and delivered via vendors
• Trend in next two years regarding the target number of physicians enrolled / participating in medical education programs

• In terms of geographic focus, Medical Education is uniquely positioned to help fuel organizations’ growth in emerging areas like China and India. Despite the growing revenue stream produced by emerging areas, device and pharma companies are devoting to Asia-emerging areas few of their total MedEd FTEs (device 7.5% vs. pharma 1.9%), few of their total MedEd programs (device 5.8% vs. pharma 1.4%) and relatively little of their total MedEd budget (device 6.4% vs. pharma 1.9%).

The research employed a data gathering approach that reaps quantitative & qualitative data from representatives at 35 medical device and pharmaceutical companies. Twenty-five pharmaceutical organizations participated in this research and 10 medical device organizations participated.

If you purchase Best Practice Database document(s), you will have 30 days from the date of purchase to apply some or all of the cost of the document(s) toward the cost of a Full Access Individual, Pharma, Group or University Membership. Write us at DatabaseTeam@bestpracticesllc.com or call David Guinn at 919-767-9179 if you have any questions.