2025 Volume 15 Issue 1 Pages 37-44
Continuing medical education (CME) for healthcare professionals in Japan has not been structured into a systematized framework, and it is mostly left to individual autonomy. While various stakeholders such as medical societies and pharmaceutical companies support continuing education from their respective standpoints, CME activities provided by pharmaceutical companies are being met with high demand and expectations from healthcare professionals and are considered to play a certain role in their continuing education. Meanwhile, these activities have several issues, including restrictions on information provision due to industry regulations, not matching the educational needs of healthcare professionals, and many of them being short, one-time lecture meetings. One of the new CME support measures for pharmaceutical companies to solve these issues is Independent Medical Education Grants (IME Grants) led by Medical Affairs. IME Grants is a grant program that enables pharmaceutical companies to support continuous medical education programs carried out entirely independent of the companies through funding, but it has been adopted by only a limited number of pharmaceutical companies. This article describes the operational process of IME Grants and presents the points to note when a pharmaceutical company introduces IME Grants. Through proper utilization of IME Grants by both healthcare professionals and pharmaceutical companies, implementation of continuous and effective education programs is expected.
