Geez, That Aged Poorly

Driving home from a family event over the weekend, I stumbled upon the theme song from “The Greatest American Hero” on the radio. It’s called “Believe It or Not” by the legendary one-hit wonder, Joey Scarbury

Believe it or not, I’m walkin’ on air
I never thought I could feel so free
Flyin’ away on a wing and a prayer
Who could it be?
Believe it or not, it’s just me

It’s not a bad song, and it was actually a fairly popular single back in the day (that day was 1981). Hearing the song got me to thinking about a recent episode of “The Greatest American Hero” that I watched during one of my, “Hey, I don’t feel like doing actual work for the next hour. Let’s see what random ’80 TV show I can watch as research for a future CMEpalooza blog post” spells.

If you aren’t familiar with “The Greatest American Hero,” the premise is that a middle school science teacher somehow encounters aliens, who are friendly enough to leave him with a silly-looking suit that gives him superpowers. In each episode, he has to harness his superpowers to catch a series of lame bad guys. The only superpower that I can really remember is that he has the ability to fly, but not fly like Superman. He flew like a mildly drunk uncle, weaving and crashing into things pretty much in every episode. I know, it sounds pretty dumb, but the show was very popular for a few years, and I loved it as a little kid (note from Derek: me too.).

Here was my reaction when I re-watched an episode a few months ago: “Oof.”

It was terrible. Just totally ridiculous – the plot, the acting, the script, the “special” effects. I lasted 5 minutes before muttering, “Well, that didn’t age well,” and changed the channel.

Because I can, and because I know it will make Derek angry that I am stealing “his thing” and giving you a Top 5 list, here are the Top 5 ’80s shows (excluding TGAH) that I loved as a kid that have not aged well:

1. What’s Happening
2. Small Wonder
3. Who’s the Boss
4. Perfect Strangers
5. ALF

I thought about expounding for several hundred words on what makes these shows unwatchable now, but then I remembered this is a blog about continuing medical education, and that I probably should tell you what this has to do with our industry.

So I will.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a colleague which read, “Say, have you come across any recent research articles about bias in commercially supported CE/CME (in the U.S.)? I’ve done a lot of searching and it’s almost as if the issue disappeared sometime around 2014 (which is a little hard to believe).”

For those of you who have been around our world for a little while, you might remember when the topic of bias in commercially-funded CME was a big issue. There were some influential folks in the medical community who made this a topic that got a lot of attention. Did it ever amount to much in the long run? Not really. Once people realized that accredited organizations have put a variety of safeguards in place to ensure that our education is fair balanced and not driven by funders’ marketing teams, it became a cause that aged poorly.

Here are the top 5 additional CME trends from the last two decades that have also aged poorly, some of which you can still hear about by going to the CMEpalooza archives:

1. Performance improvement (PI) CME: The impetus for PI-CME was admirable. Instead of having healthcare providers complete a bunch of one-off CME activities to earn their required number of credit hours, you’d encourage them to enroll in more robust programming with specific, data-driven goals and earn lots of CME credits within the activity series. Except that few providers were willing to put in the time to complete these programs, and they didn’t care about earning lots of credits all at once. Plus, these activities were very expensive to design and develop. $1 million in funding for 10 learners? No thank you.
2. Alternate outcomes models: Ever since the publication of the Moore’s outcomes model in 2003, there have been a variety of folks who have trotted out “new and improved” variations. And yet Moore’s remains the general standard across the board. Of course, many providers make their own tweaks, but nothing markedly different has ever really caught on.
3. Medical education and communication companies (MECCs) as “dirty” CME providers: There was a period of time when a small group of commercial funders would only accept grant proposals that had academic institutions or hospitals as accredited educational providers. While MECCs could partner with them on education (and many did), they could not accredit the education regardless of how the ACCME felt about them. It was quite a pain for everyone and didn’t make a whole of sense, so it fortunately quietly went away.
4. Hybrid Live Events: I guess these are still around, but I suspect their days are numbered as we continue to emerge from the COVID fog. Too expensive, too many logistical challenges, and hard to coordinate to give online learners a valuable educational experience. Admittedly, this is the one on this list I am least comfortable saying “won’t age well” as technology improves, but I’ll stick this here for now.
5. Artificial intelligence Chatbots in CME: Wait, what is this doing here? Isn’t there a session of CMEpalooza Fall in 2023 that is devoted to this topic? And wasn’t your AI chatbot session the most viewed session in the spring? Yes. And yes. But as time passes and more and more of these chatbots roll out, I’m only getting more confused. Is this the one that is supposed to help post-test questions? Which one can help organize my survey data? Might we eventually develop “chatbot fatigue”? Time will tell.

I am sure I am missing some other good ones that could be added to the list. And no, I won’t do a, “Add your favorites in the chat section” to pathetically try to drum up comments from our audience. But if you want to do so, well, great!.