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!.

Last week, Derek made another attempt to alienate our younger blog readers with a post completely centered around lyrics from a 1960/70s rock band that even I struggled to follow at times. After it was posted, I had more than one person email me to ask if Derek was feeling OK. I mean, obscure references are kind of our specialty, but that took things to a brand new low. (note from Derek: Meh, I don’t need to fight to prove I’m right. No, I don’t need to be forgiven.)

When I mentioned to Derek that, “You realize that no one under the age of 40 is going to have any idea what you are talking about,” he responded with a snippy, “That’s probably only about 5 of our blog subscribers anyway.”

I didn’t think that was fair. I mean, we have more than 900 subscribers to our blog, and I would like to think that there are at least 25 people among them born after the year of the last Philadelphia 76ers championship (that would be 1983).

So to get a toehold on this demographic and to gauge their feelings about CMEpalooza (and to supplant Derek’s planned Jimmy Buffett tribute post) (note from Derek: Wasting Away in CMEpaloozaville blog post coming soon!), I decided to put together a little Gen Z focus group. I encouraged our participants to use their best current slang that would probably go way over the heads of some of our readers but would hopefully help some of you out there avoid becoming this guy (OK, “this guy” is actually legendary Philadelphia Eagles’ announcer Merrill Reese, who was born in the age of the dinosaurs. I just wanted an excuse to mention that the NFL season starts this week and that I should not be bothered for the next 22 Sundays).

LET’S GO!!

(Quick aside: “Let’s go!” is my least favorite trendy phrase of the last decade. Every time I hear someone scream out, “Let’s go!” I can’t help but wonder where exactly they want to go. It makes no sense.)

Question 1: So what do you think about CMEpalooza?

Lowkey, CMEpalooza is pretty gucci. I’m a total stan. No kizzy cap.

Question 2: How often do you read the CMEpalooza blog? How valuable is the blog to the full CMEpalooza experience?

TBH, you guys are the CEOs of bloggers. I feel like so many people try to flex these days or they are just total noobs. Your blog is pretty lit.

Question 3: How do you feel about Derek’s haikus?

They make me want to yeet my laptop out the window. That dude is such a Chad. Take the L already.

Question 4: What do you find to be the most valuable thing about CMEpalooza from an educational perspective?

Watching CMEpalooza…it’s like I’m hanging with my squad. It just hits different than other events. Those other meetings are so cheugy. But CMEpalooza is cool AF.

Question 5: Any thoughts on the fashion sense of our hosts?

OMG, that drip is sad. You guys need to yassify yourselves or something.

Question 6: What could we do better with CMEpalooza?

It doesn’t happen a lot, but it’s always a bit sus when you have the same people two years in a row. They must be giving you guys some mad guap. IYKYK.

Question 7: Did you give a follow to the brand-new CMEpalooza LinkedIn page yesterday so that you don’t miss any important updates about our event?

Of course — you guys have mad CME clout. Plus, I’ve got FOMO.

Question 8: How much are you looking forward to CMEpalooza Fall on Wednesday, October 18?

I’m low-key freaking out that it’s only a few weeks away. Don’t sleep on CMEpalooza everyone. It’s gonna slay.

Periodt

I am sure you have all been reading in the news over the course of the last year or so about the impact that inflation is having on society. Things are always going to cost more – that’s simply the way finances work – so no, I’m not so worried about that guy who keeps screaming, “I remember when I used to be able to get a slice of pizza for a quarter. Bring back Nixon!” But it is undeniable that this has been a belt-tightening time as costs for just about everything are rising more quickly than many would like.

And, well, at CMEpalooza, things are unfortunately no different.

That is why Derek and I had a very long talk last week about the impact of inflation and the cost of our biannual events. We went back and forth — many hours of mostly silence on the phone (“Are you still there?” “Yeah” “You?” “Yep”) — before deciding that the registration costs for CMEpalooza will, effective immediately, be increasing by 25%. It pains me even to write that, but it was simply unavoidable.

Now I know that some of you didn’t excel in math as students, so let me explain to you what that means in dollars and cents. The “old” cost of attending CMEpalooza was $0. Now multiply this by 25% (or 0.25) and you get the new cost of attending CMEpalooza. If you’ve done things correctly, you should find that this “new” cost of attending CMEpalooza is $0.

(Remember that anything multiplied by zero is zero. So I could have said, “We’re increasing the cost by 34150%” and the result wouldn’t have been any different.)

That’s right folks — CMEpalooza will continue, for now and forever, to be free for everyone.

Our panels for CMEpalooza Fall are furiously working on content for the best education that money can’t buy. So put away your wallets, mark down your calendars for Wednesday, October 18, and enjoy that $25 hamburger at the restaurant down the street guilt free.