Well, another Alliance annual conference has come and gone, and all of us lucky enough to have attended have dispersed back to our respective homes with a collection of new knowledge in our heads and a touch of sunshine in our hearts (I only got to be in the sun for about 30 seconds as I walked from the cab to the hotel and back again a few days later, but what a glorious 30 seconds it was.)

For those of you unable to attend the annual conference this year, we at CMEpalooza are here to help. While your colleagues are holed up in their offices for the next few days, preoccupied with trying to dig themselves out from under the mountain of email that has accumulated during their extended absence, why not take the day to create your own personal annual conference?

We’ve recently updated the CMEpalooza Archive page to include all of the sessions from CMEpalooza Fall 2017 and there are now over 75 different (free) educational sessions for you to choose from. You can easily put together a whole week’s worth of faux-annual conference days if you want to (Don’t do that. You have better things to do with your time. Like baking a cake in the shape of Alf for your son’s birthday party. Just take a couple hours.)

To help get you started, I’ve taken the liberty of attempting to re-create a typical day at the Alliance conference, but using archived CMEpalooza sessions for the agenda. These are just suggested sessions; feel free to substitute in any of the other sessions and choose your own annual conference adventure.

The night before: Drink a few too many adult beverages and stay up a minimum of two hours past your usual bedtime. This is a critical step in preparing for the next day’s learning experience. Also, set out your running clothes so you are ready for an early morning run before the conference starts.

6:30 a.m.: Turn off your alarm and go back to sleep. Curse yourself for drinking too much and/or going to bed too late. Scowl at the waiting running clothes mocking you from their place on the shelf.

Breakfast: Get out of bed and go eat breakfast. Remind yourself of the promise you made to eat healthier this year. Proceed to skip over the fruit and yogurt and and devour five mini-muffins and a couple strips of bacon. Throw the bran muffin in the trash. What’s bran anyway?

9:00 a.m. Keynote: Chatting With Graham McMahon
Who better to kickoff our annual conference than the President and CEO of the ACCME?

10:00 a.m. Keynote Discussion: Hop on the Twitters and share your thoughts on the keynote address using the #CMEpalooza hashtag. Send an email to one of your colleagues or to Scott with your key takeaways and ask for their opinion.

Break: Grab an overbrewed coffee and tell anyone around (including your pets) that you are going to your room to check email. Turn on the TV and watch SportsCenter instead.

11:00 a.m. Plenary Session: Two Scoops of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Please!
CME activities have become too vanilla. Redundancy abounds and it has become more and more difficult to differentiate one program from another. What does it take to be truly innovative? What are groups doing to separate themselves from the masses? This panel of commercial supporters will discuss what they look for in a grant proposal, the elements that make an activity stand out from the crowd, and provide examples of innovation in education that they have funded recently. Learn how to turn your vanilla program into two scoops of chocolate chip cookie dough!

Lunch: To really recreate the conference experience, go gaze in your refrigerator at the free food available to you. Decide you don’t like any of the options provided because they either don’t appeal to you or aren’t healthy enough. Go out to eat at the closest restaurant to you with the intention of ordering a salad and glass of water. Order a hamburger and fries instead. For the sake of authenticity, pay the confused waitress $45 for the food.

1:30 p.m. Plenary Session: Casual Conversations in CME
There are lots of interesting people working in continuing medical education, but when they are asked to speak or present, it’s often on a pre-assigned topic with a somewhat rigid agenda. Not this time. In this unique session, we’ve paired together 3 teams of individuals from a variety of backgrounds and given them 15 minutes of carte blanche time to decide what they want to talk to each other about. You might hear about their career paths, you might hear about something they are both professionally passionate about, or you might even hear about their mutual love of iguanas. You’ll have to tune in to find out.

Break: Click over to the Exhibit Hall and browse around the sponsors who have signed up for CMEpalooza Spring 2017, so far. In order to replicate the true exhibit hall experience, invite a family member/colleague/neighbor/pet to come into the room and then avoid making eye-contact with them while you read more about the sponsors. After you’re done, tell them you need to check email, but go on Facebook instead and update your status (“OMG I am at the BEST conf EVERRRRRRR!!! lol YOLO, amirite???”)

3:30 p.m. Plenary Session: A Dissection of Feasible Interpretive Tangents From a Discrete Comparative Assessment in CME (aka: What Does My Outcomes Data Mean?)
What if your super power was the ability to command unlimited attention? How would you use it? Maybe negotiate world peace between the leaders of all nations? Not bad. Me? Oh…I’d use it to explain all possible interpretations of pre/post data for a case vignette question. And, yes, I’d wear a super suit. Here’s some of what I’d address:

1. Who does my data represent?
2. What qualifies a case vignette?
3. When do I need effect size?
4. Where is reliability and validity a concern?
5. Why are my post-activity scores low?
6. How do you interpret p-value?

Reception: Invite a bunch of people over to your house for drinks and light hors d’oeuvres. As they come in the door, ask each person for I.D. in order to verify it is the person you invited. Give them each two tickets they can redeem for drinks and glare at them if they ask for another. Make sure you have a giant cheese ball, because a reception just isn’t a reception without a cheese ball. Walk around for 10 minutes, pretend to get an urgent phone call, and stride quickly out the door with the phone to your ear. Leave. Hopefully, when you come back home in 4 hours, everyone will either have left or passed out in the loo.

Fin.

*****

PSA: Judging from the fever, coughing, sore throat, and runny nose that started as soon as I returned home from the Alliance conference, I believe that I have contracted the plague*. If you are reading this and were within breathing distance of me at any point during the conference, you may want to consider contacting the CDC and request that they…I don’t know…quarantine you or put you out of your misery or something. Yet another example of why virtual conferences are so great — no one can breathe on you.

*My wife assures me it is not the plague and probably just a cold, but does she have a medical degree? Noooo!

 

In case you have been living under a rock for the past week (What a weird saying. It’s not even physically possible to live under a rock. Couldn’t it at least be something remotely feasible, like say…living in a tree? I like that better. Let’s go with that.)

In case you have been living in a tree for the past week, you might not be aware that we are currently accepting proposals for CMEpalooza Spring. If you missed it, you can read all about it here. We are really hoping to get a lot of proposals to choose from, so I’ve come up with a Top 5 list of reasons that you (YOU!) should submit a proposal to CMEpalooza Spring.

Here we go:

5) Why not? Look, I didn’t say these were good reasons for submitting a proposal. Just…reasons. But it’s true — why not submit? Maybe you had an amazing proposal you submitted for a presentation at the upcoming Alliance conference, but it was rejected. Maybe you will go to the Alliance conference and come home with a great idea for a presentation that just can’t wait for next year. Maybe you’re at the Alliance conference reading this right now because the session you’re in sounded really interesting from the description but then the speaker started reading his notes in a droning monotone voice like Ferris Bueller’s teacher (played, of course, by the legendary Ben Stein) and the subject is not quite what you thought it would be and you are really bored but still in a post-lunch fog and feeling too lazy to get up and move to a different session. If that’s you (or even if it’s not), head on over to our proposal submission form and submit away!

4) This is your chance to do something different. We don’t just accept submission ideas that are different, we encourage them. We like different. And by different, I also mean weird. Odd. Strange. Unusual. We’ve had people wear wigs. We’ve had people do Yoda impressions. We’ve had a speaker blow-up. We love it all. If you have an idea for a session that you have never submitted anywhere because you think it’s too wacko to ever get accepted — submit it to us. If your dream is to create a hip hop musical based on the ACCME’s Standards for Commercial Support and you’re worried that Lin-Manual Miranda might steal another one of your ideas, may I humbly suggest you submit it to us for your premiere? Trust me on this one — you will never have a review committee as accepting of your oddball ideas as you will with Scott and I.

3) It’s easy. Presenting at CMEpalooza is a 3-step process:

Step 1: We email you a link
Step 2: You click on the link and enter YouTube Live
Step 3: You do your presentation

OK, fine, I may have glossed over a few minor steps, but it really is easy. One of the most common comments presenters make when they do CMEpalooza for the first time is just how simple a process it is. You don’t need to travel anywhere or have any special equipment beyond a laptop with a webcam (almost all of them have one built-in these days).

I should also mention that, for those of you who have a little bit of stage fright or feel uncomfortable in front of a crowd, CMEpalooza is a perfect venue for you. The only people you will see during your presentation are your co-presenters (if you have co-presenters) and either Scott or me (see #2 below). No sea of faces staring back at you. No worrying about making eye contact with the person in the last row. You won’t even know how many people are watching (I’ll know, but I’ll lie to you if it makes you feel better.) Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezee.

2) You get to meet me and Scott. I mean, how great is that, huh? Two charming and good-looking dudes like us, who wouldn’t want to meet us? Am I right? Ladies? Fellas? Anyone? Is this thing on? [tap tap]

Maybe making this #2 was a tad too high. Let’s move on.

1) Because we’re running out of ideas on our own. Seriously, we need some help. This will be our [counts on fingers] ninth palooza and it’s hard coming up with fresh ideas and topics. It’s easy for us to fall back on repeating the tried and true and what has worked well in the past, but we also want to stay innovative and try new things (Speaking of trying new things, this weekend my family went to a new Georgian [the country, not the state] restaurant in northeast Philadelphia and oh my lord was it delicious. The khachapuri — which is bread filled with gooey melted cheese — was…[kisses fingertips]. But I digress…) You are much smarter than Scott or I. I’m sure you have tons of great ideas. Just take one of them, turn it into a proposal, and submit it here.

REMINDER: PROPOSALS ARE DUE BY THE END OF THE DAY ON FEBRUARY 2

Submit your proposal here

Oh the weather outside is frightful
Might as well write a proposal
For the palooza of CME
An RFP! An RFP! An RFP!

That was…truly awful.

Honestly, I only write these ridiculous things because I make Scott review all my blog posts before I post them and it makes me laugh just thinking about him rolling his eyes and muttering expletives under his breath as he’s reading what I’ve written. Good times! (Note from Scott: Pretty accurate assessment)

On to more important matters.

When the January weather turns harsh, our minds turn to thoughts of spring, which reminds us of CMEpalooza Spring, which reminds us that we need an agenda, which makes us smack ourselves in the forehead and wonder why we didn’t start thinking about this sooner (I kid, I kid. Scott and I actually had an official planning meeting about CMEpalooza Spring months ago [cough cough… December]. I even brought along a notebook. Did I fail to take any notes and then forget everything we talked about? Maybe.)

As always, our goal with the CMEpalooza Spring agenda is to have the CME/CE community intimately involved in its development. This year, we are releasing a Request for Proposals (RFP) for anyone to submit an idea for a CMEpalooza Spring session. This perhaps sounds more impressive than it actually is since the RFP being “released” is just this blog post, but work with me here.

We are going to try to keep the process pretty simple. If you have an idea for a session that you would like to lead at CMEpalooza Spring (don’t forget the change to a 2-day agenda, April 25-26), just complete the RFP submission form below by the end of the day on Friday, February 2. After February 2, Scott and I will review all of the proposals that we have received and select six for the agenda. We may ask a few others to help us decide, or we may simply wield our extensive power and make the choices on our own. Not sure yet.

Here are a few guidelines:

1. This is an online conference and all sessions are done via YouTube Live (Google Hangout). All presenters must have a computer, access to a decent internet connection, and a webcam. Most laptops produced after 2010 have one built in.
2. Proposals will only be considered if they are submitted via the RFP submission form below.
3. The deadline for proposals to be submitted is by the end of day on Friday, February 2.
4. We are open to pretty much any idea as long as it’s possible for us to do via YouTube Live and it relates in some way to CME/CE.
5. Interactive formats with multiple presenters, such as panel sessions and interviews, are encouraged. Single-person PowerPoint lectures are discouraged, unless you can convince us that it’s going to be really, really good.
6. Please verify the availability of all presenters for the dates of CMEpalooza (April 25 and/or 26) before submitting their name in your proposal. If you don’t, we won’t be happy. Scott will probably scowl at you when you email us to tell us one of your speakers is not available. You don’t want that. Trust me.
7. There are six categories we are looking to fill for a well-rounded agenda. They are: Outcomes, Educational Design, Technological Innovations, Commercial Support, Accreditation, and CME Potpourri (anything that doesn’t fit in the other five categories). Your proposal should align with one of these categories. Ideally, we will select one proposal for each category, but we might decide to choose multiple proposals for one category based on what we receive. It’s our conference and we can do what we want.
8. We don’t want to limit creativity, so there isn’t a limit on the number of proposals you can submit, but use common sense and be reasonable. We will likely only choose one proposal for which you are listed as the lead contact, so don’t submit ten proposals or something crazy like that.
9. We will try to notify you within a week of the deadline if your proposal has been accepted or not.
10. If you have any questions, feel free to email Derek (thecmeguy@gmail.com) or Scott (scott@medcasewriter.com) or find us at the Alliance conference in a couple weeks

I think that about covers it. I especially want to encourage people who have never presented at CMEpalooza to submit a proposal. We are always happy to have new presenters participate and now is as good a time as any. The RFP submission form is below. Have fun!