Today on the blog, we spend a few minutes with Greg Liptak, President of Intelligent Medical Decisions. Inc., a gold sponsor of CMEpalooza Spring. Greg will be moderating the kickoff session of CMEpalooza Spring at 9 a.m. ET on Wednesday, April 8, bringing together an unique collection of panelists to talk about Bridging the Knowing-Doing Gap: Quality Improvement as a Path to Change.

Greg was dealing with some car issues on the day of our interview — hence the tagline of “Burning Rubber” beneath his name — but he rallied to rev up his engine of wisdom and share his CME story. Among the things you’ll learn about:

• Why Greg lives in the greatest neighborhood in the greatest city in the United States (ie, Fairmount in Philadelphia, but I needn’t have told you that)
• “The girl who got away…” and how we have love to thank (or blame) for bringing both Greg and Derek to the city of Brotherly Love and sorta kinda into the world of CME
• How to start wrapping your brain around the whole Quality Improvement movement in preparation for your immersion during his CMEpalooza Spring session

It’s always nice when our moderators get into the spirit of our ultra-casual dress code, but no one has quite nailed it like Kurt Boyce, our recent guest in the CMEpalooza Spring “5 Minutes With…” preview series. Kurt, who currently serves as Director of CME & Compliance at Applied Clinical Education, will be part of a 2-person team that will present during the 1 p.m. ET session on the topic of Achieving Level 7 Outcomes: A MEC Perspective.

Kurt has a long history in CME, which he talks about in our “hard-hitting” interview.

Among other gems, you’ll find out:

• What CME was like in the late 1980s (yes, there was actually a precursor to PowerPoint that cost thousands of dollars every time you used it)
• How Kurt has gone from designing education to measure Level 1 outcomes to designing education to measure Level 7 outcomes during the span of his career
• How smart Derek seems when he isn’t talking (he doesn’t say a word the whole time but just smiles glumly — he must have been following the Phillies getting shut out once more in spring training on his iPhone)

Check out Kurt’s video below:

When you are stuck in the rut of meeting day-of-day deadlines, it’s easy to forget the wealth of help that is available in the CME community to not only make your professional life easier but often to make it better. I caught myself looking through the CMEpalooza Sponsor listings the other day and marveling at the diverse range of services they provide, so in a personal effort to make the lives of our dedicated audience easier, here is a general classification and description of our current sponsors (with more coming soon!):

Pharmaceutical Companies

• Genentech

Medical Education Companies

• CMEMatters
• CMEology
• CME Outfitters
• Forefront Collaborative
• Global Academy for Medical Education, LLC
• Imedex
• Impact Education
• PlatformQ

Service/Technical Providers   

• ArcheMedX
• Decision Simulation
• Educational Measures
• HighMarksCE
• Intelligent Medical Decisions, Inc.
• infograph-ed

You can find out more information about all of these companies (some even have videos — how high tech!) on our Sponsor page.