The Challenge

Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine Center for Continuing Education’s (BU CCE) SCOPE of Pain (Safer/Competent Opioid Prescribing Education) program has delivered opioid prescribing education for more than a decade, beginning in 2012 through national grant funding tied to the FDA’s Risk Evaluation Mitigation Strategy (REMS) initiative. Over the years, the program has evolved across a range of formats, including online courses, podcasts, printed monographs, live meetings, and webinars. Because the curriculum must remain aligned with the FDA-mandated blueprint for opioid prescribing education, the program operates within a highly structured framework that limits flexibility. As BU CCE looked to expand the program’s reach, the team identified rural prescribers as an important audience but recognized that it did not have strong direct access to those providers on its own.

Why BU CCE Chose HealthLink Dimensions

To address that challenge, BU CCE partnered with HealthLink Dimensions to support rural outreach for SCOPE of Pain webinars. HealthLink stood out because of its ability to target provider audiences with greater precision and because of the team’s confidence in the quality of its email validation and demographic segmentation. Rather than relying on a broad list approach, BU CCE wanted to reach a specific audience with messaging that would feel relevant and credible. HealthLink’s ability to support both audience targeting and campaign deployment made it a strong fit for a program that needed to expand its reach without compromising on audience quality.

The Strategy

The rural outreach initiative was designed as a focused extension of a national educational program. BU CCE combined faculty expertise from its academic collaborators with HealthLink’s outreach capabilities to promote webinars tailored to rural prescribers across the country. Because the program already had national scope, the team approached this effort as an opportunity to test a more targeted campaign model while still drawing participants from a wide geographic footprint. The first campaign served as an important baseline, helping the team understand how the audience responded and where friction existed in the registration process.

Lessons from the First Webinar and Refining the Approach

BU CCE approached the initial rural webinar as a careful first step, recognizing that SCOPE of Pain did not yet have strong name recognition or established trust within rural provider communities. The first campaign moved quickly, with the team working to assemble assets, finalize contracts, and launch outreach on a compressed timeline. While the webinar created a useful entry point into this audience, it did not perform as strongly as hoped and highlighted the challenges of introducing the program to a new segment without the benefit of extended planning and follow-up marketing.

That experience helped clarify what would be needed going forward. For the second webinar, BU CCE was able to take a more deliberate approach, with more time to think through the campaign, market it appropriately, and support it with a stronger second wave of promotion. That added time and structure made it possible to refine the overall outreach strategy and create a more effective launch for the rural audience.

The contrast between the two efforts suggested that rural providers may have a significant appetite for this kind of education when the campaign is given enough time and support. Ilana Hardesty, Assistant Director, Operations, BU CCE, and Program Manager for SCOPE of Pain, noted that the second webinar “did much better,” with stronger numbers overall and unusually high attendee commitment once the program began. As she put it, “our show rate was unlike anything I’d ever seen.” Together, the two campaigns reinforced the value of testing into a new audience thoughtfully, learning from early performance, and applying those insights to build stronger engagement over time.

Results

Those changes translated into stronger results for the February webinar. Most notably, the event achieved a 75% show rate, significantly outperforming BU CCE’s typical webinar benchmarks. The team noted that even a 50% attendance rate would usually be considered strong for a free webinar, making the February performance especially meaningful. Participants remained highly engaged throughout the full 2.5-hour evening session, with very little attrition by the end of the program. In addition to stronger attendance, the campaign also contributed to broader geographic participation, extending the reach of SCOPE of Pain beyond BU CCE’s more familiar audience concentrations while still maintaining strong representation from states like Massachusetts and New York.

Partner Experience

From a partnership perspective, HealthLink Dimensions helped BU CCE reach a provider audience it could not easily access through its own channels. The value of the collaboration went beyond list support, encompassing targeting strategy, campaign execution, and iterative performance improvement. By identifying drop-off points, refining communications, and improving the registration path between webinar waves, the teams were able to build a more effective rural outreach model. That process gave BU CCE not only stronger immediate performance, but also a framework it can continue to optimize for future events.

Conclusion 

Overall, the case study should show that BU CCE successfully expanded the reach of SCOPE of Pain to rural prescribers by pairing a proven educational program with more precise provider outreach and campaign refinement. The story is not just about generating registrations, but about learning from audience behavior, improving conversion, and creating a stronger path to participation for a hard-to-reach provider segment. With continued webinar optimization and growing interest in measuring educational outcomes, the initiative gives BU CCE a more scalable model for future outreach and a stronger foundation for demonstrating program value.