When you are stuck in the rut of meeting day-of-day deadlines, it’s easy to forget the wealth of help that is available in the CME community to not only make your professional life easier but often to make it better. I caught myself looking through the CMEpalooza Sponsor listings the other day and marveling at the diverse range of services they provide, so in a personal effort to make the lives of our dedicated audience easier, here is a general classification and description of our current sponsors (with more coming soon!):

Pharmaceutical Companies

• Genentech

Medical Education Companies

• CMEMatters
• CMEology
• CME Outfitters
• Forefront Collaborative
• Global Academy for Medical Education, LLC
• Imedex
• Impact Education
• PlatformQ

Service/Technical Providers   

• ArcheMedX
• Decision Simulation
• Educational Measures
• HighMarksCE
• Intelligent Medical Decisions, Inc.
• infograph-ed

You can find out more information about all of these companies (some even have videos — how high tech!) on our Sponsor page.

This week we truly begin our “5 Minutes With…” video series with the person who I personally thought wrote the most entertaining abstract of all those submitted — Jason Olivieri. Jason is the Manager of Outcome Services at Imedex and will be presenting at 11 AM ET on Secrets of CME Outcome Assessment…Revealed. We had an action-packed five minutes with Jason, which included:

• A story of criminal masterminds collecting chemical waste
• My lovely co-producer and moderator Scott going AWOL for a few minutes during the middle of the video
• Jason’s bird voicing his opinion in the background
• The word “sexier” being used to describe Level 7 outcomes

Check out Jason’s video below:

We are now just a shade under one month away from CMEpalooza Spring (yikes!), so we thought it would be a good time to introduce a new feature on the blog called “5 Minutes With…”. These will be quick interviews with an individual from each of the CMEpalooza Spring sessions and we’ll be asking them each two questions:

1. What is your CME story?
2. What can we expect from your CMEpalooza Spring session?

To kick things off, I forced Scott to do a “5 Minutes With…Scott Kober” session so we could practice. He was less than thrilled about it, but was a good sport and did a nice job. I, on the other hand, am battling a vicious cold which has left me stuffed up and a little loopy and prone to ramble (at least, that’s what I’m blaming it on…). Anyway, here’s the video. Enjoy!