6 World Education Blog

Sixty-two-year-old Linda Casebeer seems to be going only up from here. Working within a variety of industries including education and medicine, she has created a research methodology and company-assessing the outcomes and effectiveness of continuing medical education-that keeps growing despite a struggling economy. Her clients include the who’s who of big pharma-Pfizer, Genentech, Abbott and health advocacy groups such as the American Heart Association.

Now that all of her children are grown, Linda has been able to take both entrepreneurial and personal risks, including getting her book of poetry, The Last Eclipsed Moon, published. Though her passions early in life involved being in the classroom and later upon the medical field, she found ways to incorporate entrepreneurism with her love for education.   

After graduating from North Carolina State University with a degree in political science, Linda first began working as a 3rd-grade teacher.  Linda was fired from her teaching job because she was pregnant, a representative sign of the times in America and a then-commonplace practice against women in the workplace. Striving to be her best, she returned to school to get a master’s degree in education from The Citadel as well as a master’s in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University.

While finishing her coursework for a PhD from Indiana University in 1985, Linda started working in a large teaching hospital, where she was promoted to its academic affairs division devoted to educating healthcare professionals. After 10 years, Linda was recruited to conduct research at the University of Alabama Medical School in the division of continuing medical education. While at the university, she conducted randomized educational trials to see what continuing medical-education programs were most effective. At the time, she was part of a team compiling years worth of data that often went unread, and the biggest spenders-the large pharmaceutical companies ($1 billion to $2 billion a year)-were paying little attention to programs that worked and those that did not.

In 2001, this research led Linda to found what is today known as Outcomes Inc. Though her company has succeeded in large part on its own merits, she acknowledges that governmental policies helped create a market for her services. The business accelerated when the Office of the Inspector General advised pharmaceutical companies to split their marketing activities from educational programs. Yet past the early stages of starting her business proved to be some of the most difficult, particularly extending work beyond the initial startup phase. She had to relinquish some control: “Due to expansion, I could no longer personally make sure that everything going out the door was high continue reading