Today we spend a few minutes with Wendy Turell, DrPH, Senior Director, CME Outcomes and Analytics, PlatformQ Health. Wendy is a CMEpalooza veteran — having participated in the original CMEpalooza last year — and is making her triumphant return to CMEpalooza Spring with a solo session on 5 Tips to Make You a Survey Measurement Rock Star. Check out our interview with Wendy below to learn a little more about her session and find out how she got started in CME (SPOILER ALERT: she didn’t start out her career with a plan to work in CME. Shocking, I know.)

As a side note — yes, the video does extend beyond the supposed 5 minute time limit indicated in the title. I had things perfectly on track until Scott threw in a last second question that screwed up my timing, so blame him. Perhaps we should rename these “5-ish Minutes With…”

It’s always nice when our moderators get into the spirit of our ultra-casual dress code, but no one has quite nailed it like Kurt Boyce, our recent guest in the CMEpalooza Spring “5 Minutes With…” preview series. Kurt, who currently serves as Director of CME & Compliance at Applied Clinical Education, will be part of a 2-person team that will present during the 1 p.m. ET session on the topic of Achieving Level 7 Outcomes: A MEC Perspective.

Kurt has a long history in CME, which he talks about in our “hard-hitting” interview.

Among other gems, you’ll find out:

• What CME was like in the late 1980s (yes, there was actually a precursor to PowerPoint that cost thousands of dollars every time you used it)
• How Kurt has gone from designing education to measure Level 1 outcomes to designing education to measure Level 7 outcomes during the span of his career
• How smart Derek seems when he isn’t talking (he doesn’t say a word the whole time but just smiles glumly — he must have been following the Phillies getting shut out once more in spring training on his iPhone)

Check out Kurt’s video below:

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.