Heading down the homestretch of our final preparations for CMEpalooza Spring (it’s like, Wednesday, in case you forgot), we’re doubling up on the blog today by rolling out the last in our “Sneak Peek” presenter interviews. On this one, we check in on Monique Johnson, MD, from Imedex, who will be kicking things off in our Spring extravaganza at 10 a.m. ET.

Going first at a conference always brings with it challenges and opportunities – you usually have a more attentive audience that has not been worn down by session after session, but it’s also up to you to set the tone for the rest of the day. After talking with Monique and her co-presenter, CMEpalooza veteran Audrie Tornow from Paradigm Medical Communications, I think we’re in good hands.

As everyone knows, the best way to convince someone to do something they may not want to do is to guilt them into it. And so, when I met Sara Miller at January’s Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions annual conference (at the bar, of course), it is possible that I may have casually said something like, “So, how is your abstract for CMEpalooza Spring coming along?” And Sara, who is apparently too nice, may have responded with something like “Uh, good, good. Just fine.”

Lo and behold, a week later, it was apparent that my strategy worked, as an abstract with Sara and her co-presenter Heather Guerrero from Gilead Sciences showed up. They will be presenting a session during CMEpalooza Spring entitled “Kwahl’i-tē im-prūv’mĕnt: You Can Say It, But Can You Do It?”

We recently caught up with Sara, who daylights as the Director of the QI Institute, CE Strategy and Content at Med-IQ, to talk about her upcoming session. Consider the video below as your guilt-free pleasure of the day.

Last week, Derek and I gave what I thought was a pretty successful series of presentations about CMEpalooza and our use of Google Hangouts On Air during the World Congress on Continuing Professional Development in San Diego.

We participated in one of the conference’s two “Innovation Lab Demonstrations” where session attendees were split into groups of approximately 10-15 individuals, rotating between each station for a 15-minute presentation.

Kudos to the conference organizers and especially Tym Peters from the University of California at San Francisco (our moderator and timekeeper) for being willing to try a new format and adapting between Day 1 and Day 2 to make a better experience for learners. Essentially, they turned the tables around so that each presenter didn’t have to raise his/her voice to be heard over the noise in the room – an easy fix, perhaps, but it made a big difference.

My rough estimate was that about half of the attendees had heard of and/or were familiar with CMEpalooza – not bad for an international audience. There were a variety of questions about our events and the potential use of Google Hangouts On Air (GHOA) for accredited educational activities. It was nice to see the wheels in the minds of some of our attendees churning as they thought about how to leverage the platform for their own purposes.

While there are certainly some nuances that take some getting used to as a regular moderator of the GHOA platform, both Derek and I have found it to be a very user-friendly platform that simply requires some experimenting and testing to master.

As part of our World Congress presentation, we developed a handout that walks through the basics of how to set up a GHOA session – basically, it’s your beginner’s guide. You can access the handout by clicking on this link. If you want to start tooling around, this should hopefully get you started. We’re always interested in hearing from others who are dipping their toe into the GHOA waters and answering any questions you have about it, so feel free to reach out to either of us if you really get stuck.