These companies would like to contribute to a greater extent to the educational sector, particularly to the online parts of it, but this contribution is often regarded as controversial. To analyze the reason for this, the relationship between these two factors must be researched more deeply. The aim of this thesis is to uncover the needs, opinions, and experiences of HCPs in the continuous medical education (CME) sector. What are their positions regarding the contributions of pharmaceu-tical companies in this field, and how does this change their attitudes?

To address these questions, online surveys were distributed amongst HCPs of different specializations. The results of these sur-veys suggest that there is an interest in online offers but that these offers are generally not sufficiently appealing due to several factors. The writers then interviewed various people from the medical sector to gain deeper insight into their specific experiences and recommendations for future CME offers, specifically online.

The interviews illustrated that most of them are exceptionally open to digitalization in the educational sector. Even the notion that it could be provided through CME did not bother them. These results were derived from people from different demographic backgrounds. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that the lack of information and quality content is one the primary factors that pharmaceutical companies should tackle when providing online CME in the future. The fact that a pharmaceutical company is behind an offer disturbs only a minority of doctors, since they know that they bring substantial professional knowledge and structured qualitative content to these CME offers.