About Challenger A Message from Our CEO FAQs

Who Is Challenger Corporation?

Challenger Corporation is a clinical training, testing, and competency validation company headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1991, Challenger has produced high-quality physician education and competency testing courses. Challenger’s library has grown to become the world’s largest electronic library of these types of courses. The full library contains over 3,700 hours of AMA Category 1 accredited CME. We serve the educational and training needs of more than 400,000 primary care and hospital-based physicians, as well as over 60,000 physician assistants. Challenger courses are designed to prepare physicians and other clinicians to the latest standard of evidence-based and practice-based standards. In addition, the comprehensive curriculum prepares physicians and clinicians for certification and recertification examinations, maintenance of certification requirements, continuous competency testing, and fulfillment of CME requirements.

Who Validates Our Courses?

Challenger courses are approved for physician CME credit through joint sponsorships with several prestigious medical schools and medical specialty societies. All Challenger joint sponsors for AMA Category 1 credit are accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME). Several Challenger courses are also recognized for other types of credit for physicians and physician assistants. The Challenger course content is continually peer-reviewed by a team of over 200 practicing physicians and clinical experts nationwide. The philosophy of our advisory board and reviewers reflects a cross-section of the various medicine specialties we serve, including prominent fellows of the ACEP, AAEM, and the AAFP.

Save Time With Challenger

Challenger’s courses are available 24/7 on CD-ROM or via Challenger’s online learning portal. Automated scoring and interactive feedback features are explained thoroughly in the easy-to-follow tutorial included with each course. Physicians and other assorted clinicians who rely on Challenger courses can increase their diagnostic accuracy, clinical confidence, competency, and proficiency. The proven Challenger programmed learning approach represents a substantial time-saving complement or alternative to time-intensive seminars and review programs.

Benefits Of The Challenger Library

• Coverage of all relevant primary and acute care topics
• Quick and comprehensive clinical reference
• High-resolution clinical images and illustrations
• Unsurpassed certification, recertification, and maintenance of certification preparation
• Continuous competency training
• Convenient continuing medical educational (CME) fulfillment
• Continually updated and peer-reviewed content
• Free technical support

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A Message from Our CEO

Robert E. “Bob” Sweeney, PhD, MS, MBA

Ten years ago, the company I was with went public and I retired, or so I thought. On the suggestion of a family member, I purchased part of a small Memphis company, Challenger Corporation, and joined its Board of Directors. At the time, I was just an investor looking for opportunity in the “medical profession” writ large. Now, ten years later, as the chief executive of the largest and best known medical training company in the United States, I want to share with you my own sense of pride and accomplishment with what our company has achieved.

Today, Challenger creates and distributes a highly respected and broadly employed testing and training library. In the early days, Dan Jones, MD, our founder, built a unique new way of preparing for the emergency medicine boards and convinced a handful of friends and family to back his vision. Today, we offer over 40 courses across the full spectrum of primary and acute care specialties.

Early on, Dan and perhaps five or six of his physician colleagues constituted authors, editors, reviewers, and promoters…all from a small, old, rented house in suburban Memphis. Today, over 200 prestigious clinical authors and editors maintain and expand our library. Our Physician Advisory Board directs our new course development and ongoing peer review. It is comprised of eight prominent physician educators and leaders from all walks of medicine. And our library and its companion management information system is installed at over forty well-known residencies and training programs where the physicians and physician assistants of tomorrow are being schooled in medicine with Challenger training materials.

One reason we know that Challenger is the standard-setter in what we do is because our best customers are also our investors. In the last ten years, over 100 of Challenger’s physician customers have invested from $10,000 to $80,000 each to become participants in the Challenger story. Ask yourself the next time you buy something from a book peddler at a review course how you would feel about that book if you owned part of the publishing company. From our point of view, every Challenger customer is an “investor” — from the doc who buys a Challenger atlas to refresh his skills to the Challenger Lifetime Subscriber who has drawn from her pension plan to purchase stock in the company. Our culture is such that we endeavor to treat each customer so that he or she is part of the Challenger family.

I will be very surprised if you cannot find a course or two that would save you time, enhance your knowledge base, improve your chances of recertifying or maintaining certification, or simply expand your reference library. Let us know if there are other courses you would like to see in our catalog. Or perhaps you’d like to develop a course of your own. We’re always open to new ideas and on the lookout for new “partners” in the Challenger enterprise. Send me an email at bobs@chall.com or call me at 901-762-8449 if you’d like to talk.

Sincerely,

Bob Sweeney
Fall, 2005

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FAQs

 Who We Are
 A Broad Mission
 An Expanding Vision for Primary Care
 New Acquisitions, New Directions
 Current Leadership
 A Technological Innovator
 Physician Services
 Expanding Patient Education: The Practice Web Site
 Challenger Program for Residencies (CPR)
 Challenger Program for Physician Assistant Training
 Continued Growth Opportunities
 Sponsorship and Associations

Who We Are...

Challenger Corporation, based in Memphis, Tennessee, is the creator of the largest library of electronic physician education material in the world. Our library of continuing education products includes:

• Best-selling boards review products in several specialties,
• Over 3,700 hours of approved continuing medical education (CME) materials, and
• Thousands of high-quality images.

A Broad Mission

Dan Jones, MD, founded Challenger Corporation in 1991 with a broad mission to change the way physicians practice medicine through the use of new computer technologies. Challenger built and sold its first boards review products in Emergency Medicine in 1993. By 1997, Challenger had created review, reference, and education products in Emergency Medicine, as well as cross-specialty products in electrocardiogram interpretation and dermatological presentations. Under the guidance of Dan Jones, Challenger developed product lines in Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, Women's Health, and Pathology.

An Expanding Vision for Primary Care

Challenger’s revolutionary Med-Challenger programmed learning series has become the best-selling electronic test preparation product in the specialties of Emergency Medicine and Family Medicine, and Challenger is developing the same markets in Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Pathology, and Obstetrics/Gynecology. Challenger has sold products to over 16,000 individual physician customers since 1991, and developed brand awareness, relationships, and intellectual assets that position us as a market-leader in the industry.

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New Acquisitions, New Directions

In 2001, Challenger acquired The CE Channel, a California based Internet continuing medical education firm founded by Gary Goldman, DDS, MD. Dr. Goldman and the relationships acquired with his firm have been integral to Challenger’s moving into new media types and distribution methods.

In 2002, Challenger acquired HealthyMe.md, a Memphis-based physician Web-hosting firm. HealthyMe™ built a sophisticated patient education and practice communications platform with a large audience in Family Medicine and OB/GYN.

The HealthyMe™ practice platform already has over 300 practices subscribing to education, communications, and marketing services, representing over 1,300 physicians.

Current Leadership

Bob Sweeney, semi-retired after successfully founding and participating in the public offering of a physician contracting company, invested in Challenger and joined the Board of Directors in 1997. He joined the company full-time as Chief Operations Officer and Chief Financial Officer, and became CEO and President in 2000. Bob holds a doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon University and four earned masters degrees, including an MBA and a degree in experimental psychology.

David Beard invested in Challenger and joined the Board of Directors in 1998, and also serves as Chief Financial Officer. He was elected Chairman of the Board in 2003.

Laura Goodman-Bryan joined Challenger as Vice President of Operations in 2002, and was promoted to Chief Operating Officer in 2003. She joined Challenger after ten years in customer service with John Hancock, Inc., and six years as an operations executive in a publishing firm. Laura holds her MBA degree from Boston University.

More about Challenger Leadership.

 

A Technological Innovator

Challenger has developed processes and digital technologies that lower the traditional costs of creating electronic education, reference, and communication products by an order of magnitude. Because of the existing base of intellectual assets, the huge library of media, physician relationships based on years of common interests, and sophisticated editing and deployment platforms, Challenger’s cost of production is twenty-five percent of the production costs of companies just entering the marketplace.

Firms such as Elsevier, Inc., the world’s largest medical publisher, recognize these unique competencies and Challenger’s large physician market, and have licensed the company to produce a new category of products based on their industry-leading textbooks and world-renowned authors.

Physician Services

Challenger Corporation serves the 400,000 primary and acute care physicians in the United States. Our key service areas are:

• Physician education
• Institutional residency and training program services
• Practice/patient communications
• Patient education

These customers are offered a variety of educational and communication solutions for physician and patient education, practice communications, practice marketing, and pharmaceutical support.

Physician Education in the U.S. is a two billion dollar enterprise. Challenger has created a new category of physician self-assessment, training, and reference products. These products have wide market acceptance, excellent brand recognition, and represent true value per dollar when compared to other categories of computer-based training available to doctors.

Challenger Program for Residencies (CPR)

Challenger produces the most effective residency education platform on the market. Combining a large library of primary and acute care educational material with a unique reporting platform, Challenger can save hundreds of physician hours annually in routine training, assessment, and student management tasks.

More info.

Challenger Program for Physician Assistant Training (CP-PAT)

Challenger produces the most effective Physician Assistant education platform on the market. Combining a large library of primary and acute care educational material with a unique reporting platform, Challenger can save hundreds of PA hours annually in routine training, assessment, and student management tasks.

More info.

Continued Growth Opportunities

Challenger’s ability to provide a trusted brand to both the physician and the patient provides a natural capability that pharmaceutical and medical device companies need. Challenger can act as a back-end service operation, providing the means for a physician education strategy coupled with a direct-to-consumer advertising and education initiative to introduce new treatments to the health care market. This makes Challenger a potential supplier not only to pharmaceutical and device companies themselves, but also to outside marketing and education agencies.

Expanding Patient Education: The Practice Web Site

A natural offshoot of Challenger’s primary and acute care physician education capabilities is the area of patient education, which is one of the most time-consuming areas in any physician’s practice. Providing constantly updated educational materials via a practice Web site has a dramatic impact on patient compliance with treatment and the cost of care. Challenger provides these services to physicians throughout the United States via HealthyMe™.

Along with the practice Web site and marketing tools, Challenger provides a set of HIPAA-compliant communication tools for the patient and the practice. Routine tasks such as scheduling appointments, refill requests, sending patient newsletters and email management can be done through the practice site.

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Sponsorship and Associations

Over 200 prestigious physician authors and reviewers, seven medical universities and two major specialty societies jointly sponsor Challenger programs. Internationally recognized programs such as George Washington University, Vanderbilt University, Emory University and their faculties co-sponsor and co-produce seminars and educational programs with Challenger, or use Challenger training and management information systems to instruct and track the performance of physicians in training.

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