Aug. 15--Memphis-based Challenger Corp. has established a relationship with a Boston company, eResidency.com, to provide steady growth in demand for Challenger's continuing medical education products.
Challenger Corp. has about 1,400 hours of approved continuing medical education courses, which chief executive officer Robert E. Sweeney said makes the company "the world's leading provider of electronic clinical medical content for CME."
EResidency.com offers an Internet-based program, called the Residency Management System, that automates and streamlines the administration of academic residency programs.
In this relationship, Challenger educational software will be sold at a discount through the eResidency.com portal to medical residents at U.S. and Canadian medical universities and hospitals.
"It has the potential to be quite promising financially," Sweeney said. "From our point of view, it's more important strategically, in that we are acquiring all of those doctors. When they come out into private practice, guess who they're going to use for continuing medical education? Challenger. They're familiar with it. They're comfortable with it."
The American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Emergency Physicians have approved Challenger software for continuing medical education. This approval ensures the material itself is correct and adequate safeguards are in place to ensure the training is effective.
This factor and the sheer volume of training available has helped Challenger become the largest single provider of continuing medical education for the HealthStream health care education Web site, said Rob Laird, HealthStream vice president and general counsel, from the company's headquarters in Nashville.
"The founder, Dr. Dan Jones, put together a pretty comprehensive body of work," Laird said. "When we started, there really wasn't a lot of electronic content out there. They were really an early pioneer in the provision of continuing medical education via electronic means."
Jones, an emergency room physician, started the company in 1991 in Eads, Tenn. He still serves on the Challenger Corp. board of directors.
Sweeney said the company operated unprofitably for several years but recently started making a net income. In 1998, David Beard, a Memphis-area investor who spent 12 years as a contract programmer, pumped more capital into the company, which Sweeney said helped double revenues.
"They were brought to my attention by my accountant a couple of years ago," Beard said. "The company has a whole raft of interesting products, and I was looking for something interesting to get into." Challenger Corp. has been distributing its training materials on compact disc, readonly memory, but it now has a Web site, MyChallenger.com, which is being tested. Sweeney said his company hopes to launch this site by the end of 2000.
The company employs 10 people and has about 100 contributing authors -- physicians who Sweeney said write the material more for the recognition than for the nominal payment.
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(c) 2000, The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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