By now, you have undoubtedly heard about the controversy associated with this year’s CMEpalooza sponsor event, CMEpalooza Pursuit.

People submitting duplicate entries using fake email addresses and fake names.

People using blue pens instead of black pens to complete their entry forms.

People trying to slyly answer 8 instead of 9 questions, thinking we wouldn’t notice.

People forgetting to use the secrecy envelop and mailing in naked forms (note from Derek: oh, the humanity!)

Frankly, it was all a bit discouraging and required a lot of extra work to cull out those successful entrants from those tricksters who tried to worm their way into the prize drawing. Fortunately, we didn’t end up arguing in front of the Supreme Court, although we did have to throw out several thousands entries who didn’t follow our very detailed, intricate submission instructions. All it took was one misspelled word and you were out. Sorry, but dems the breaks (note from Derek: I see what you did there and I approve.)

Nonetheless, we’re happy to report that there were quite a number of individuals who qualified for this morning’s prize drawing. As promised, we had five winners, each of whom were awarded $100 Amazon gift cards. I’d suggest holding on to them for Amazon Prime Day – not coincidentally scheduled to overlap with CMEpalooza Fall on Wednesday, October 14 – so you can maximize their value.

Here are the winners of CMEpalooza Pursuit:

• Vanessa Gray, Director, Continuing Medical Education, Des Moines University Medicine and Health Sciences
• Jesse Henry, Consultant, OhioHealth Learning Continuing Medical Education
• Monica Nicosia, Nicosia Medical Writer LLC
• Cindy Davidson, Scientific Editor, Global Learning Collaborative
• Amanda Kaczerski, VP, Educational Strategy and Design, The Academy for Continued Healthcare Learning

Congrats to the winners. To the losers, as Philadelphia sports fans throughout history have said over and over again, better luck next year.

 

In these trying times, anything that changes up the same old boring routine is a welcome diversion.

“Hey kids, wanna go for a hike? (again)”

“Nah.”

“How about throwing a frisbee around in the park?”

“Not interested?”

“Maybe you can invite a friend over, both wear masks, face shields, body armor, and chain mail helmets?”

“Sounds boring.”

We get it, there just isn’t much left these days. Lucky for you, at least for this weekend, we’ve got fun for the whole family!

CMEpalooza Pursuit

Your kids will love learning about the many fine sponsors of CMEpalooza Fall (“Boy mom, I didn’t know that your work was so interesting. I want to learn more!”). You can perhaps even bribe them by saying, “Look, fill out the entry form, and we split the prize 50/50 if we win.” Then you tell them the prize is $50 (it’s really $100), and pocket the majority of the money. Everybody wins!

If you have forgotten how to play CMEpalooza Pursuit, all of the details are in this post. Entries are due by the end of day on Monday, so that gives you the entire weekend to cuddle up with your loved ones and dig in. You’re welcome.

I come from a big board game family. Growing up, we had pretty much all of them. Yes, there were the usual standards such as Monopoly, Clue, and Sorry! but we also had some more obscure gems such as Careers, Parcheesi, and Rummy Cube. I spent a lot of time lying on the rug in the den beating up my sister at all of these games. Good times.

That’s why it’s always fun when it comes time for our CMEpalooza Sponsor event. While I haven’t quite figured out how to replicate some of these board games for our format (yet), it does allow me to harken back to those days of yore.

With a record 28 sponsors for CMEpalooza Fall — not too late for your company to join in! — developing this fall’s event was quite a lot of work. Some of our previous game designs such as CMEpalooza Bingo!! would not work (only 25 spaces). But fortunately, others were just fine. And so, thanks to some help from our intrepid Fall intern TJ, we’re bringing back CMEpalooza Pursuit this fall for another go round. There are some brand new categories such as The 80s (natch) and Food and Drink to join the more traditional ones.

Here is how CMEpalooza Pursuit works:

1. Click here to download the list of forms you will need, both the questions and the answer form
2. Use the Sponsor tab of the CMEpalooza website to get links to all of the companies involved in this event. You’ll need to visit the Sponsor sites to get the answers to all of our questions. We promise there is nothing that can’t be found within a click or two.
3. Complete the entry form by coming up with a correct response to one question in each category. That’s nine questions/answers in all.
4. Added bonus this year — you can enter up to three times, as long as you select different sponsors in each category for each entry.
5. Send your completed entry form to me via email at scott@medcasewriter.com by 5 p.m. ET on Monday, September 28.
6. Take that 4-leaf clover and clutch it tightly to your chest

We’ll be giving away $500 in Amazon gift cards to our winners – there will be 5 winners of $100 each randomly selected from all of our correct entries. We’ve been doing these events for so long now that many of our most loyal players have won thousands of dollars thanks to our generosity. They hope you will be too overwhelmed by work and family that you won’t have time to play CMEpalooza Pursuit. Don’t let them quiet your voice! Find 15 minutes, complete your gameboard, and give yourself a shot at the big prizes.

And… go.