The Art of the CMEpalooza Abstract

Over the always-frenetic President’s Day weekend (my Martin Van Buren costume slayed – sadly, no photos), Derek and I spent hours poring over the abstracts that were submitted for CMEpalooza Spring. I remember the first year we piloted the abstract submission process, we were simply crossing our fingers that we would get enough people sending in proposals so that we could fill out the agenda. I think there was actually one year early on where we had to supplement the submissions with a few ideas of our own.

These days, as we’ve continued to build our footprint in our little community, it’s not quite so nerve-wracking. That doesn’t mean I don’t get the annual panicked “Why do we only have five submissions? It’s the day before the submission deadline!” text message from Derek. I usually ignore him until, about 12 hours later, the next text comes in. “Oh, I guess people were waiting until the last day to submit something. They are coming in now.”

Every. Single. Time.

After another year of weighing the merits of submitted proposals, I’d love to tell you that there is a magic formula to winning our hearts. Sadly, the one absolute, stone-cold lock format — a CMEpalooza musical — once again was not mentioned in a single one of the abstracts that were submitted for the Spring 2024 meeting. That means that you will likely again get a plea from Derek next year for anyone willing to be bold enough to show off their pipes. But other than that, as I review the abstracts that were selected for inclusion in our Spring agenda, there are few consistent patterns to be found.

Some approved session descriptions were very long. We’re talking 500+ words. Some were very short. We’re talking less than 100 words.

Some had fully fleshed out titles, panelists, and topics. Some were more vague — “I’ll figure out who else to invite eventually.”

Some were rifts on popular shows or movies, although “I want to do a session where I dress up as Fonzie and recite the ACCME’s Standards for Integrity and Independence in Accredited Continuing Education. Ayyyyy!” was not selected this year. Some went the more traditional rapid fire roundtable route.

There were some topics that were repeated in multiple selections. This is one of the trickier areas since we have a limited agenda. While we know that we may want to include something on a specific “hot topic,” we will usually only pick one session to avoid redundancy. This year, it was artificial intelligence and its role in accredited education, which you will certainly hear about in our Spring event. In previous years, it was quality improvement or social media or “why I have the best/worst boss in the world.”

Neither Derek nor I like saying “no” to anyone who takes the time to submit an abstract for CMEpalooza Spring (note from Derek: I hate it.) And often, we will take ideas from rejected abstracts and circle back around in the Fall in some capacity to either cover a similar topics or pull parties from specific proposals into other sessions. So if you got a “Sorry, but no” email from us, it’s not necessarily the end. It may just be that we’re holding onto your topic for a later event.

It’ll be a week or so until we get the formal agenda up on our website for the whole world to see, but I think that everyone will be excited about the topics and formats we have in store. If the abstracts we approved are any indication, this is going to be a lot of fun. Right, Potsie?