During our regular CMEpalooza check-ins, Derek and I usually have a good grasp of the calendar, including when and where various levers need to be pulled to ensure the success of another Palooza.

It was therefore a bit unusual when, while speaking earlier this week, we both realized that it was T-minus 3 weeks until CMEpalooza Fall is upon us (Wednesday, October 21, but you already knew that). But being the seasoned pros we are, there was no need to panic. OK, there was minimal need to panic, but that passed quickly. (note from Derek: I am happy to report that, unlike CMEpalooza Spring, I remembered not to schedule a work trip for the day of CMEpalooza Fall. Progress!)

So without further ado, here is what you can expect from us the next few weeks:

Next week (October 5-11): We’ll be holding our annual sponsor event, where you will get the chance to learn all sorts of interesting information about the innovative organizations that support CMEpalooza Fall. More details coming on Monday morning.

October 12-18: The return of the CMEpalooza STEPtacular Challenge, sponsored by Talem Health. Derek generously lets people get their steps in over the weekend (and sometimes gives people an extra day if he is feeling kind), but if you want to win the big money, we’d suggest to start building up your stamina now.

October 14: CMEpalooza Haiku. I don’t think I have ever specifically promoted this before, but Derek has gotten pretty good with his poetry so let’s give him his flowers.

October 21: The live broadcast of CMEpalooza Fall. Earlier this week, we showed you one example of how you can make our live day of education truly special for your team (we’ll have a second example next week). And yes, we realize there are still a few small details that need to be filled in with our agenda – don’t worry, everything will come together as it always does.

October 22: Take a deep breath and celebrate another year of CMEpalooza.

October 23: Begin preparations for CMEpalooza 2027. Yes, you’re stuck for us for another year (at least)

A few weeks ago, we announced that we were going to be running a series of short profiles featuring representatives from organizations who take advantage of the broad-based, free, on-demand education that CMEpalooza provides to creatively engage their teams.

We are slowly but surely building up our database of interviews, and are happy to present the first one to you here. If you are interested in showing off how your organization Paloozas (yes, I am using this term as a verb, so shut it Mr. Grammarian), drop me a quick note and we’ll try to include you in this series.

We’re launching our series today by featuring Katie Robinson from Vindico Medical Education. I’ll let her explain why. You can either watch the video or read the transcript below to get a sense of our conversation.

Scott: Hello, everyone. My name is Scott Kober, and I am one of the co-producers of CMEpalooza.

I would like to welcome you to the first of what will hopefully be a short series of interviews entitled How Do You Palooza? The intent of this series is really to show how various organizations in a medical education enterprise—hospitals, health systems, MECCs, so on—creatively encourage their teams to take advantage of our free education.

I’m here today with Katie Robinson. Katie is currently the Vice President of Instructional Design and Analytics at Vindico Medical Education. Interestingly, Katie arrived at Vindico in 2014, which is the same year that CMEpalooza made its debut. So both her career and our little experiment have blossomed in tandem.

Thank you, Katie, and welcome and thanks for joining me today.

Katie: Thanks for having me.

Scott: So tell me a little bit first about the makeup of your team at Vindico. How big is your team? Do people work remotely? Are there folks in the office? That sort of stuff.

Katie: Yeah, so at Vindico, we have about 60 full time employees. I would say about half of us are local and about half of us are remote. So at our company, our larger company, we come into the office on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Those are the days when half of us are there, the rest of us are still remote. So we’re very accustomed to having people online, people in a live meeting space. The nice thing is that CMEpalooza always falls on a Wednesday. So we’re in the office anyway.

Scott: Okay. So then what does the lead up to a live CMEpalooza day look like at Vindico? What sort of special preparations do you guys make?

Katie: Right. So because a lot of our meetings are on Wednesdays and Thursdays when we’re in the office, the first thing we do is we clear calendars. Any of our regular scheduled meetings that are fall on Wednesdays, we clear the calendar. And that’s sort of our first step. And as a leadership team, we feel like that gets buy in, right?

If the leadership buys into the point where they’re clearing calendars, this must be something that they want us to take advantage of and attend. So that’s our first step.

Our second step is looking at the agenda and finding somebody internally that sort of aligns with that session. So if it’s something on outcomes, it would be something that myself or somebody on the analytics team would be designated as the leader of that section. Other than that, and I can talk more about what our leaders in the sections do, but other than that, it’s more just sending reminders, asking people to really commit to this, letting them know why we think it’s important, and sharing the agenda so that they can select a couple of sessions that align with what they do or what they’re interested in.

Scott: When and why did this all start?

Katie: Honestly, this started because as things started to evolve as they do and my role at the company started to evolve, I decided that I thought a lot of this stuff was really important and that I quite frankly was sick of explaining it to everyone. So I thought that if other people, if they could hear from other people, maybe that would sort of create more realism. And this is not just something that Katie’s saying, this is something that other people are talking about as well.

So it really started as me getting people to attend and then as more and more people started to listen and talk about it, it just snowballed and then it just became what it is. We think it’s a wonderful opportunity to learn and it’s free, right? So it’s not like everybody has to take all this time out and travel and pay a crazy registration fee. It’s all free and it’s by the people that would be speaking on these topics anyway.

Scott: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we always hear is, organizations, you have 60 people there. You actually aren’t sending 60 people to an Alliance conference or any sort of live meeting. It’s just the cost-prohibitive nature of things. But a lot of these 60 people are the people who are probably new to CME, probably don’t have a lot of knowledge of the industry. So we always say this is a great opportunity to educate those newer project managers, those kind of people who are just out of school or new to the team about what is going on in the CME space.

So then what does the actual day of CMEpalooza look like at Vindico? You said half your team is at the office, half your team is at home. Do you guys broadcast things in a conference room? What does that all look like?

Katie: Yeah, so before the meeting, and we’ve gotten much better at this too. We’ve made our learning experiences much more interactive. But I think that one of the critical things is that we engage our people that are remote. So whether it’s people that are traveling or just employees that are remote, they feel connected to those of us that are live learning together in the same conference room.

So for those of us that are live, we convene in a conference room, we usually have breakfast in the morning, we get lunch for the lunch session. But internally, we use Zoom for all of our chat communications. So we have a chat group for the whole company and you can join the CMEpalooza chat session at that time. And the person I said that we have as a leader, their job is to engage that chat, right? So they’re listening, the people in the room are obviously having conversations about what’s happening, but it’s their job to bring the people that are remote into the conversation as well.

Sometimes there’ll be a polling question and we’ll sort of answer in the room collectively, but then they’re talking to the people online, oh, this is what we said in the room, here’s why, making sure that they’re feeling connected. Another thing that we’ve done in recent years—which I really have to give credit to a couple of people that have enjoyed CMEpalooza a lot and found it a really great learning experience—is they were like, we can do better in our own learning environment. So they’ve created sort of puzzles and games to help people feel more connected to the presentations that are happening. So we’ve done things like, come or attend two or three sessions and tell us what you’ve learned. And then you’re entered into a drawing for a gift card at our next all-hands meeting. Last time, we did “Write down a golden nugget,” which had to be like three words or less, and then people voted on the top golden nugget from each section and they were entered into a drawing. So we’re really encouraging people to participate, but also just to think about the content that they’re learning too and not just listen.

Scott: Okay. So you said that you are the outcomes lead sort of internally, the outcomes team lead for CMEpalooza. So what other teams kind of are there that typically are organized for this?

Katie: Yeah, so we all watch together. I don’t want you to think we’re like watching in silos, but it’s just whatever that session might be on. If it’s a session about grants, I’ll get somebody from the grant development team to lead that session. If it’s something about program management, I’ll get them to be the leader for that session. We also, a lot of times we just have like a potpourri section, right? So I’m just asking somebody who I know really wants to be involved and they’d be really good at engaging the conversation, I would have them be the leader of that session. And then these people are also the ones that are responsible for collecting all the responses and reading them as they’re coming in and having people vote and things like that.

Scott: So then do you do anything after the live CMEpalooza days to kind of summarize or kind of collate some of this information?

Katie: Yeah, you know, last time we did a really nice word cloud. This year, I think we’re gonna do like a word search. And again, like these kinds of things, it just so happens we have a quarterly all hands meeting that usually follows very closely to the spring and the fall sessions. And we sort of share them at that meeting that’s company wide. That’s when we talk about our golden nuggets or the things that we learned and have sort of our live drawing of the winner of the CMEpalooza for Vindico.

Scott: OK, so you guys obviously have a fairly big team, 60 people. So what could a group of, four or five people, your hospitals, your health systems who have small CME departments, what can they sort of learn from how you guys sort of approach CMEpalooza days?

Katie: Yeah, so I will say, so my own team is 7, including myself. And I encourage everybody to attend two sessions that most align with their role here, but also one that they don’t know about and they’re just interested in learning. And then when we have our team meeting, we’re making sure that we’re talking about those sessions.

So I can imagine that if a smaller team had something similar, you could encourage them to attend a couple sessions that align with what they do and then maybe one or two that don’t and then share what they learn. I think that that’s really what it comes down to is that we’re learning—sometimes together, sometimes separate—but that we’re sharing the things that come out of it. So maybe instead of maybe everybody watches the lunch session together or if they’re remote, they log on to a chat session like we have, but just making sure that they are sharing their experiences, I think that’s what makes it more of a collective learning environment is that you are not just passively listening, but you’re talking about the things that you learned.

Scott: All right, great. Well, thank you, Katie. Hopefully you’ve given others out there some good ideas for the future. We will see you and hopefully everyone else on Wednesday, October 21st for our free day of live virtual education during CMEpalooza Fall. Thanks again and we’ll talk soon.

Because CMEpalooza was, is, and always will be an event free to any and all who want to partake in our events, it has typically been considered to be “education for the masses.”

Certainly, among the primary intents of our approach has been to educate those who are unable to take advantage — be it for financial, logistical, or other reasons — of the live educational opportunities that often pop up in the CME calendar. Every now and then, we’ll hear from organizations who coordinate special “CMEpalooza Days” to encourage their teams to watch our sessions, either together in conference rooms or individually from the comfort of their homes. Traditionally, we read these stories as “That’s kinda neat” anecdotes, but we never considered doing anything more with them.

But during our exhausting multiday planning meeting for our upcoming Fall event, we talked about collecting some of these stories to share with the CME broader community. Why? Certainly, shameless marketing and to give us fodder for future blog posts, but also to encourage you to think creatively about ways you might be able to make Palooza day a time of internal collaboration for everyone on your team.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be using this space to highlight some of the organizations who have made Palooza day into something special for their team. Some folks keep it simple; some are more thoughtful and comprehensive. Maybe you’ll like what these folks are doing. Maybe you’ll think it’s all a bit silly. You do you.

If your organization does something special for your team on our live CMEpalooza days that you’d like to share, please let us know via email (click here for Derek’s email — he likes hearing from strangers. Be sure to write him many paragraphs about the latest book you are reading). I bet he’ll even agree to feature your group in one of our short video interviews.