While the rest of the CME world decompresses after another banner year of CMEpalooza, here at Palooza HQ, we simply couldn’t ignore our mailbag that was overwhelming with cries for help. And so we’re back with another installment of our Ask Us Anything feature.
We’d love to keep this going through the end of 2025 and beyond, but our advice is only as good as those who seek it. So if you have an issue (professional or personal) you want us to help with, click here to submit your question(s). While we may not have a professional degree that would be of use, we promise we’ll try our best to be helpful.
Dear Derek and Scott,
I’ve been hearing a lot about pharmaceutical and medical device companies offering “educational grants,” but I can’t shake the feeling there’s more to it than just goodwill. What’s the real reason they provide these grants? What actionable takeaways/insights are they hoping to get? How do they use those and why are they important? For example: How is understanding, “Time is a barrier to change” an actionable takeaway?
Giddily,
Curious but Cynical in Cleveland
DEREK: I struggled with how to respond to this question, but decided on honesty as the best policy. There’s no need to shake the feeling that there’s more to educational grants than just goodwill. There is. I don’t think there’s anyone who has worked in this industry for a decent period of time who would disagree. But that does not mean that there is something nefarious afoot.
This is how I explain my job to my mom: I work for a company that creates a product that helps people with a certain disease. One of the strategies for informing people about that product is through independent medical education (IME) programs. IME programs cost money to produce, so we provide grants in areas of our interest to defray those costs. We support IME because we believe that the product we produce is helpful in treating patients and will be included as part of the educational materials. When managed appropriately, everyone benefits.
So, no, supporters do not give educational grants strictly out of goodwill. I suppose we can argue about the altruistic value of this approach, but I don’t see the point of that. I have worked for two different supporters and can honestly say that both of them, without a doubt, have the patient at the heart of their mission. I’m sure the same can be said for most supporters. The real reason we provide these grants is because we think they will ultimately improve patient care. There is room for cynicism here, some of it undoubtedly warranted, but that has not been my overall experience over the past 25 years of working in IME.
SCOTT: Unlike Derek, I have never worked on the supporter side of things so I can’t speak with any sort of authority as the altruistic nature of the pharma supporter. I will concur with our advice seeker that, from an external perspective, our whole enterprise may appear a bit suspect, which is probably why we are occasionally in the crosshairs of policy makers who wonder exactly how and why our industry works.
We all know that pharma companies will only support education in therapeutic areas that they have a product to treat (or a product in development to treat), and often have a set of internal goals/educational needs that will shape the grant proposals they will support. Yes, this means that there may be a flood of education on disease state X while there is nothing on disease state Y. We see this all the time – a long-ignored therapeutic area where nothing new has emerged for a decade or more all of the sudden has a rush of new therapeutics approved and the educational floodgates open. This may seem odd – let’s face it, patients didn’t sudden stop going to their doctor with disease state Y – but it’s the way our world works. And truth be told, many clinicians that I have spoken to are most interested in education that at least touch on new drugs so that they can determine whether they are (or are not) something they should/will consider for their patients.
As to the second part of your question related to “what do the pharma companies get out of supporting grants,” I could point you to a whole slew of previous CMEpalooza sessions where our panelists talk specifically how the data they receive from providers is used internally to shape future corporate strategy. Again, I don’t work in pharma and never have, so I can only share anecdotal data from others, but it does appear that at least some of our educational outcomes do more than fall into a black hole never to be seen again.
Dear Scott and Derek,
We have outstanding grant applications in a few supporter portals and cannot reach anyone at the companies for status updates. Emails to their general mailbox, direct messages to relevant employees on LinkedIn, AND calls to the main corporate office have yielded no results. Shy of taking a road trip to their headquarters and camping out in the lobby, how else can we connect with someone who can give us a yes or no answer?
Gently,
Awaiting Answers
SCOTT: This is a pet peeve of mine as well. I recently was working on a grant proposal in response to an RFP that read, “If you have any questions about this RFP, please direct them to Person XYZ at personxyz@pharmacompany.com.” I usually don’t bother knowing that any response to a question will usually be vague and unhelpful, but I had a question that was fairly germane to our proposed budget and would have been good to know. I sent a series of emails to Person XYZ (it was someone I knew from professional circles a bit, so I felt somewhat confident that I wouldn’t get ghosted) but never got any sort of response. So we eventually had to take our best guess and wing it. You’ll be stunned to know that our proposal was not the winning one.
Now, your question is a bit different. I am guessing that you have submissions that have been languishing in supporter portals far longer than the 45-60 day review window that is usually promised on supporter websites, and you are hoping for some sort of status update on your proposal. This is another common frustration of providers, especially when a proposal has a live element to it that is tied to a specific event or congress.
I can’t say with any certainly why you are getting the cold shoulder from various supporters, but I have a few guesses based on conversations that I have had in the past:
- The supporter has been unable to get his/her grant committee together for this therapeutic area and therefore does not know when your proposal is going to be reviewed. So instead of giving you a “We don’t know” answer, they simply are not responding to you.
- The supporter currently has no budget in this therapeutic area but likes your proposal enough that they are holding onto it in case they do get some sort of incremental funding down the line. But since they have no idea if this is going to happen or not, they simply are not responding to you.
- The supporter is overwhelmed with grant requests and is way behind on reviews. Your turn will come eventually, but since they have no idea when “eventually” may arrive, they simply are not responding to you.
- They think you are being a pest and have better things to do. So they simply are not responding to you.
I don’t have any great advice for you beyond, “Be patient.” Eventually – maybe in a few weeks, maybe in a few months – you will hear something. If your proposal is tied to a specific meeting and that meeting has now passed, your proposal won’t be funded (this happens not infrequently). If it is not date specific, there is still a chance, though I will say from experience, the longer a grant languishes, the less chance it will be funded. That said, I did recently have a proposal that sat with a provider for 7 months before it was funded out of the blue. We never found out what had happened that caused it to sit for so long.
DEREK: [Long sigh]
Look…on a macro level, most people…[thinks about it]…yes, most people are terrible at correspondence. As someone who has a propensity to overcommunicate, this drives me nuts. It’s not that hard to send out a quick email with an update or respond to a text with a thumbs up or whatever.
On a micro level, I won’t try to defend the inconsistent communication from the supporter side. We should be better.
Scott has put together a good list of reasons above that I’d like to respond to. Again, I do this based on my own experience and don’t speak for others blah, blah, blah, you get the point.
- Absolutely. This is probably my #1 reason for not responding. It’s not always specifically a grant committee issue, but something has gone wonky that I wasn’t expecting (budget delay, disagreement on strategy, etc.) I usually try to give an initial update if there is a delay, but if the delay continues, I am probably not going to constantly respond to your emails with additional updates, especially if I have no new information. Unfortunately, the answer to “how much longer” is frequently “I don’t know.” And sometimes, I get tired of saying that.
- Rarely. Or I should say, rarely would I do this and not let you know. If the supporter you applied to is primarily RFP-based, then it’s unlikely that this is the reason. If you submitted an unsolicited proposal, then I suppose it’s possible.
- Sure, I suppose. Probably not.
- Yes. This definitely happens. (side note: please don’t DM me on LinkedIn.)
Dear Derek and Scott,
What should I do if I forget to include an important attachment with a grant submission? Ask the supporter to reopen the application? Shrug it off since it would likely have been declined anyway?
Grumpily,
(Lack of) Attention to Detail
DEREK: Yes, just contact the supporter and ask them to reopen the application or upload the attachment for you. We all forget stuff — none of us is perfect. One year at the Alliance conference, I forgot and left my bag behind at three separate meetings in one day. Who am I to judge someone for forgetting an upload?
SCOTT: OK, but then what if your supporter is one of those people we talked about in the previous question, and they decide to ignore your email? What then? Huh huh huh? (I can tell you what Derek’s response would be without even asking him — “Stop bothering me.”)
I have probably submitted more than 1,000 grant requests over the course of my career and maneuvered through many, many weird grant portals. I used to spend far too much time making sure every “I” was crossed and every “T” was dotted (Strike that. Reverse it.) before I hit the submit button, and there were still times when I either forgot something or realized that I didn’t put everything into every field that I wanted to. It happens.
Certainly, emailing either the general grant mailbox would be the best first step. Hopefully you’ll get a response. And if not, well, there are many grants in the sea of CME.
CMEPALOOZA 