Typically, when we have a random drawing to select the winners of our special sponsor events, it’s a BIG production. We hire entertainers (Right Said Fred was the headliner last fall), provide a lavish spread of food and drink, and generally party for hours and hours. The cops have shut our party down at 4 a.m. twice in the last few years, but hey, we don’t really care. It’s the event our tireless team of crack interns looks forward to most each season.

So it was, alas, somewhat anticlimactic this week when the prize drawing was confined to my home office. I couldn’t even muster the energy to blast I’m Too Sexy on my speakers, but you can do so if you really want to.

Nonetheless, we have several happy winners, each of whom won $100 Amazon gift cards. Here they are:

• Sabrina Stambaugh — Manager, Physician Development, Baptist Memorial Health Care
• Carrie Roberts — Director, Continuing Medical Education: Utah Region Steward Health Care
• Karen Chiarini — Education Events Coordinator, Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children
• Jesse Henry — Consultant, Learning, OhioHealth Learning Continuing Medical Education
• Stephanie Staggs — Program Coordinator, Graduate & Continuing Medical Education, College of Medicine, Texas A&M University

If you are at all curious about the correct answers to each question, you can find them by clicking here.

 

For anyone who has been following CMEpalooza since our early days , you’ll know that every year, we try out new things. Occasionally, these succeed, but more often, they fail to garner any traction and simply get buried beneath the tombstone of “Derek’s Dumb Ideas” (my failed ideas, of course, were brilliant but simply before their time).

One of these ideas was something we called CMEpalooza Company Spotlight. The premise was simple – we would work with an organization tied to CME and plan a 30-minute broadcast that spoke to a fundamental issue of interest to the CME community while also highlighting what that organization was doing to address that issue. We even gave away two free opportunities to jump start interest, which I think we both thought were pretty interesting and added value both to the featured organization as well as our audience.

Alas, no one was willing to actually, you know, pay for the Spotlight and so these simply went away.

Until now.

That’s right folks, we’re bringing back CMEpalooza Company Spotlight for a special event next Wednesday, April 8 from 11-11:30 a.m ET. I’ll be joined by some of the fine folks at Educational Measures to talk about the challenges of transitioning from live, in-person conferences to live, online events. I think we have all already seen some of the struggles our community is having as we are being forced to adapt to unfamiliar technology, so we’ll be focusing on how to proactively avoid some of the common pitfalls of live, online education so that we can maximize the effectiveness of our education.

We’ll be broadcasting this special event on our LIVE page. There is no registration required and attendance is, of course, free for everyone. We hope to have some time to answer questions from the audience as well (feel free to submit any burning questions in the comments section below in advance of the broadcast if you want to).

Ehhhhh…the updates aren’t really that important, but I figured that if I said they were important and used an exclamation mark, more people would click and read. No, no, I am not a marketing professional…I just play one on the Internet.

That’s about all I have for an opener. You’re busy. I’m busy. Let’s get right to the updates.

Update #1
We have updated the agenda with information about our opening breakfast session sponsored by AcademicCME: How Should the CE Industry Respond to a Novel Healthcare Crisis? COVID-19 is obviously something that is having a major impact on all of our lives, both personally and professionally. Our hope is that this session can help make some sense of how the CME community can respond.

Speaking of the coronavirus, a local business near my home has a Window of Hope where they display pictures from neighborhood kids about their hopes for the future. I think 3-year-old Jack might be on to something here. Seems like as good a plan as any.

UPDATE #2
Scott wants me to remind everyone that the CMonopolE (née CMEopoly) sponsor event thingy ends tomorrow, so get your entry in ASAP. You can read all the important stuff here…and by important I mean that you can win a $100 Amazon gift card.

UPDATE #3
Update #3 is still a secret and I can’t actually tell you what it is (once again: marketing genius!), but we have something cooking for next week that we hope you will find helpful. I don’t want to say too much until we have all of the details finalized, but let’s just say that an old CMEpalooza brainchild may be making an unexpected return. More details to come! (<– building suspense! I am available for marketing consultations.)