When you’ve been doing something for a while — beekeeping, beer making, basket weaving, something else that starts with the letter B — you can sometimes take things for granted. “Surely, everybody knows the four things that beehives need to flourish! Why would I waste time telling anyone about that!”

(In case you are interested, those four things apparently are sun [or afternoon shade], access to fresh water, protection from the wind, and privacy. I am neither a beekeeper nor particularly interested in bees, but that’s what the Google tells me.)

You may have heard that we are celebrating our 10th anniversary at CMEpalooza here in 2024, which may not sound like a really long time in the grand scheme of things, but it’s not nothing either. So yes, there probably are some things that Derek and I took the time to explain in the early days of CMEpalooza that we simply assume everyone knows by now. And you know what they say about people who assume…

So this one is for you, the CMEpalooza newbie.

How do I get updated information about CMEpalooza? I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an email from you, and I don’t feel like going to your website every morning to see if you have posted something witty.

It’s true that we don’t have any sort of mailing list that we’ve painstakingly accumulated over the years to jam your inbox with useless information. So unless you want the latest CMEpalooza updates, you won’t hear from us. But let’s assume you want to know every time there is a new blog post that has come out. All you need to do is scroll down to the bottom of our homepage and click the “Follow” button. There, you will join the 967 other lucky folks who get that periodic morning ping to get their day started (note from Derek: Yes, you read that correctly. Almost a thousand people intentionally follow the CMEpalooza blog and voluntarily receive our blog posts in their inbox. It’s crazy. I try not to think about that too much whenever I am writing a new post.) You could also choose to follow our LinkedIn page — we typically will post something to notify people when a new blog entry is available there as well.

I saw you published your CMEpalooza Spring agenda last week. Looks great, though I’ll ignore the fact that half of the sessions have some “TBA” fields. I desperately want to tune in on Wednesday, April 24. Is there anything I need to do? Someone I need to pay?

It’s true that there isn’t much in this world that is free. There was a guy outside my house this weekend who was trying to charge me a dime to “breath the air.” I bargained him down to a nickel. Shrewd, I know. But CMEpalooza indeed is one of those rare freebies that requires almost nothing (and $0) from our audience, thus proving accurate the old axiom that the best things in life are free. On the day of our live events, you don’t have to register and you don’t have to pay anything. You simply go to our Live page and click on the link to the session you want to view. They aren’t there yet, but they will be. Patience, please.

But April 24 is my wedding anniversary and my spouse will kill me if I plan anything that doesn’t entirely revolve around them.

You sound just like my wife (she’s the best, even though she never reads our blog and will never see that I just complimented her). You don’t have to have a good excuse to miss our live broadcasts. Life happens. The good news is that you can watch all of our sessions from CMEpalooza in our Archives. It’s pretty much updated as soon as each live session wraps up.

I’m bored, but I’m on the clock so I need to do something that is related to my job. You got anything for me?

Of course. We’re happy to help. For starters, you can mosey on over to our Archives, where you can watch any session since our meager beginnings. Yes, yes, I know, I used to have hair. That’s what a “Decade of Derek” does to you.

If you want to check out what some other CME-related organizations are up to these days, you can peruse our current Sponsor listings. It’s basically a who’s who of everybody who is anybody in our industry. If you are bored at work, maybe you are also looking for a job. Can’t hurt to see what sorts of options may be out there for you. We won’t even take a finders fee.

Wait, you guys have sponsors? That’s cool.

Isn’t it though? Yes, there are currently 29 organizations who have sponsored CMEpalooza in 2024. It’s a lot of medical education companies, but there are some other folks sprinkled in there as well. Maybe you even want to talk to your boss about becoming a CMEpalooza sponsor (note from Derek: Smooth, Scott. Very smooth.) We accept new sponsors all the way up to our live broadcast days. Just point your boss to our Sponsor Prospectus where we have lots of lots of cool opportunities available. That’s sure to help your upcoming performance review, so go for it!

One of my co-workers said something about how we can win money through certain events you guys have. She’s kidding, right? (But I am behind on my rent)

Nope, not kidding. We’ll have a special event for our sponsors sometime in early April along with the CMEpalooza STEPtacular Challenge, sponsored by Talem Health. You can win money through both of those events. There may be other fun opportunities that pop up, too. Just tell your landlord to be patient.

Is there any way you can reference something from like, within the last 30 years in your blog? You do realize that I have never watched Happy Days or Hoosiers, I don’t know who Dr. J is, and I wasn’t alive to watch the Berlin Wall fall. For the love of Olivia Rodrigo, please make it stop.

Sorry, this one you’ll have to live with.

Ugh, fine. At least it gives me something to talk to my grandparents about.

Low blow.

Sorry not sorry. Anything else you forgot to mention? 

Hmm, blog subscription, no registration, free to watch, April 24, archives, sponsors, the ’80s were the best. I think that covers it. You are now a CMEpalooza veteran. Congratulations.

 

 

The first time that Derek and I kicked around the idea of having our community submit abstracts to us for potential inclusion in the CMEpalooza Spring agenda maybe 6 or 7 years ago, there was no grand plan that this would be the permanent path forward. In fact, I’m fairly certain that after our first or second try, we temporarily shelved the idea because there simply weren’t enough people willing to step forward and try something bold.

Our initial plan was that the abstract submission process would give us a little bit of a break from having to come up with ideas for sessions twice a year. The reality was that we ended up with maybe 3 or 4 viable ideas that we’d then need to supplant with whatever else we were able to cobble together. Don’t get me wrong, everything always worked out just fine (and often, though I’m biased, better than fine) but it wasn’t exactly executed the way we drew things up. We were Norman Dale putting everyone in place to run the Picket Fence, only to watch Ollie dribble the ball off his foot, have it ricochet to Jimmy Chitwood, who then promptly hit the jumper at the buzzer for the win. The final score was all that mattered, though getting there took some doing (note from Derek: While Norman Dale was the head boys basketball coach of Hickory High in Hoosiers, it was drunken assistant coach Shooter who ran the Picket Fence. Scott got caught watching the paint dry on this one.)

After benching the abstract submission process for a year or two, we eventually circled back to it because, well, coming up with an agenda on our own twice a year was hard. And yes, slowly but surely, people began to get it. A CMEpalooza abstract is not your traditional meeting abstract. First of all, you don’t have to have a fully formed concept or title. You may have some “TBA” panelists joining you. You don’t need to list learning objectives, or experience levels, or expected outcomes. Yet though we ask for very little, we often get quite a lot.

Our longest abstract submission this spring clocked in at a whopping 386 words. That’s not an abstract, that’s a senior year English thesis! But it was funny and creative and really interesting so, yes, it made the cut.

We’re proud to unveil the working agenda for CMEpalooza Spring this morning. There are still some Ts to be dotted and Is to be crossed (strike that… reverse it), but the gist of things is here. I am not entirely sure what some of these sessions are going to look like or how our panelists are going to pull things together, but it’s those unknowns that we hope makes CMEpalooza something to look forward to. If you like NPR shows, or Ted Lasso, or Disney rides, we’ll be riffing off of each of those this spring. If you like always hot topics such as outcomes design, or the future of AI in CME, or the dreaded “another year of overcoming funding challenges,” we’ve got that as well.

Whatever else you have to do this morning as you celebrate Leap Day, please take a minute to peruse our Spring agenda and put a circle around every “can’t miss session” (again, I’m biased, but that should be all of them). We’ll see you on Wednesday, April 24.

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?