Standing Still and Looking Forward: Season 6 Highlights and 2024 Teasers

1. Introduction 

Hello Write Medicine friend and welcome to the final episode of season 6. 

We have almost arrived at winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, which is on December 21 this year. I have to say I  love solstice. This word is derived from the Latin sōlstitium, which comes from the parts sōl meaning “sun,” and sistere, “to stand still.” And so the word solstice translates to something like “the standing still of the sun.” 

But today’s episode is not a lesson in Latin, which, by the way, I took for 5 years at school. Alas, I remember very little, except for snippets from Virgil’s Aeneid, like fortes fortuna adiuvat, which translates to something like fortune favors the brave.

Rather, today’s episode is an exercise in standing still. Because solstice presents an opportunity for us to look back at the year behind us and look forward to the lengthening of the days and what might lie ahead. In fact we just worked through an exercise of reflect, review, and redirect as a group in WriteCME Pro, the professional development membership I run for medical writers who specialize in CME/CPD. 

In CME/CPD, we know that reflection is a powerful tool. When we take time to reflect, we create a window into what we are doing and the why behind what we are doing. When we can see what and why, we can become more intentional about our practice as CME/CPD professionals.

We can: 

• Refresh personal and professional priorities
• Make conscious the unconscious
• Boost our sense of self-agency by seeing what we accomplished.

So in a spirit of standing still and reflection, I’m going to share some highlights that you might have missed from season 6 and preview what’s in store in 2024, based in response to the listener survey we fielded this Fall and conversations I’ve had with many of you over the last few months. And at the end of this episode I’ll be sharing details with you about a digital goodie bag.

By the way, listeners Renee and Regina were the lucky prize draw winners for our survey respondents. Fabulously glossy, white ceramic mugs with the Write Medicine logo are on their way to your kitchen as we speak. And if you, dear listener, would also like to be sipping your morning coffee, tea, or other beverage from a Write Medicine mug, they are available, along with other merch, in the Write Medicine store, which you’ll find on my website at alexhowson.com. The link is in the show notes. 

2. Highlights 

Since September, we’ve covered a lot of ground. We’ve explored how to assess outcomes via self-efficacy and degrees of commitment to change, how to use checklists to streamline education content, how to build gender equity, and of course how the CME/CPD community is using generative-AI. 

We also covered tips on using plain language to create education content for both health professionals and patients. In Ep 77 Ahava Leibtag shared a plain language checklist with us and also an ebook to support content creation on sensitive topics like addiction, mental health, palliative care, senior care or vaccines. If you support learners through education on sensitive topics like these, this resource will help you find the right words and the precise phrasing to inform and empower your learners—and also fill them with hope. 

In Ep 68, 70, 71, 75, and 76, we explored different active learning tips and tricks to use in live online education activities and provide a foundation for facilitated learning. Notably, for me, because I’ve taken her training, in EP 68 expert facilitator Gwyn Wamsbrough shared tactics for running effective and engaging live online sessions. She reminded us how establishing psychological safety up front and getting all voices heard early on in a virtual session encourages participants to actively contribute versus passively receive content. Tactics like using "ask then tell" taps into what adult learning research tells us about the power of connecting content to experience. 

I’ve been applying Gwyn’s advice to my own teaching and learning in WriteCME Pro and at the University of Chicago, where I teach medical writing and editing ethics. And I’ll be drawing on Gwyn’s advice when I teach adult learning principles as part of the CHCP prep course at the Alliance’s annual meeting in New Orleans in February 2024. 

If you are going to the Alliance conference I’d love to connect with you. I’ll be running a practice-based session on how to redefine responses to everyday stressors and co-presenting a session with Audrie Tornow, Karen Roy, and Allison Kickel on stories of entrepreneurship. 

So here’s a question for you. Can education address gender inequities in the health professions? Rebecca Ortega answered this question with a resounding yes in EP 72. She shared the work that Women as One is doing in cardiology to promote talent in medicine via several different education and professional development programs. Much of this work involves painstakingly building relationships with other organizations and those of you who collaborate with partner organizations will be keenly aware of how much energy and strategy this type of work takes. 

But if CME/CPD is going to be involved in building equity in the health professions, then perhaps the field should be doing more to design collaborative programs with non-profit organizations that already focus on equity. 

What do you think? Perhaps your organization is already involved in this type of painstaking collaborative work. I’d love to hear about it and share your perspective with Write Medicine listeners. 

And of course, we explored generative AI and ChatGPT in episodes 74, 82, and 84. My personal takeaways remain similar to those I wrote about earlier this year for Medium and the American Medical Writers Journal. I’ve been playing with gen-AI a lot this year, mostly to support podcast production but also for content ideation and as a collaborator when I’m planning curriculum. I’ll include a tech stack list in the show notes if you’re interested in what I’m using beyond ChatGPT and Claude. 

Here are the main lessons from gen-AI for me:

1. Explore and Experiment with AI to understand its capabilities. Remember you're in the driver's seat, so play around with the tools you’re using and adapt them to your specific content creation need.
2. AI tools can be effective for summarizing and extracting key points from medical texts or planning meetings. We can ask it to improve or simplify language, quickly information retrieval from papers and documents. 
3. But AI absolutely has persistent limitations. 
1. AI is not yet capable of independently handling complex writing tasks. A lot of AI content is garbage, even with prompt refinement. 
2. It’s not a replacement for human expertise but it can be a supplement for human expertise, providing you review and refine AI-generated content as part of your quality control.
4. And we need to be transparent about how AI is being used in the content creation process. There are copyright and privacy issues when using AI and the danger of reproducing social, cultural, and political bias is real. As Luba Kassova wrote recently in an article for the Guardian newspaper, women are largely absent from the AI world as developers and the experts who communicate about generative AI are mostly white men, and mostly US-based. So there’s a danger that AI-generated content in general and in the world of CME/CPD will be homogeneous and shaped by the voices and experiences of a narrow social, cultural and economic group.  

3. Behind-the-Scenes 

I’m sending a big thank you to all of the guests who shared their wisdom and insights on the podcast in Season 6. And if you might are wondering how I select topics and guest for Write Medicine, here’s how. 

Fans of the show say the main reasons they listen is #1, for their own professional education and development, #2, to learn about what their peers and colleagues are doing in CME/CPD, and #3, to learn about continuing healthcare education strategies. 

So I use these three criteria to select guests for the podcast who are doing interesting work directly in CME/CPD but also adjacent to the field. That’s one reason we’ve had so many guests in Season 6 who work in adult learning and professional development in general rather than CME/CPD in particular. We can learn a lot from a cross-disciplinary focus.

But Write Medicine is evolving. As you are probably very well aware, thi spodcast in a very niche podcast market. CME/CPD itself is a very niche industry that virtually no one outside of medicine has ever heard of. But did you know that Write Medicine  is the only podcast that airs weekly and shares an inside look at the work that CME/CPD professionals to support health professionals and, ultimately, patients? 

Over the almost last 3 years, the podcast has evolved into a hub of consistent, quality information that throws expert light on the past, the present, and the future of CME/CPD, as well as space to explore best practices in creating education content. 

The podcast’s listener demographics have evolved too and many of you are medical writers who work in or are trying to break into CME/CPD. Medical writer survey respondents told us they tune into Write Medicine to get tips and tricks for content creation, build evidence-based knowledge about CME/CPD writing, and learn about the career trajectories of established writers. These reasons led us to add the First Friday feature in Season 6, which showcases medical writers, and introduce listener Q+A before recording expert inteviews, as we were able to do with Nuria Negrao and Katie Lucero. 

We’ll expand this in 2024. You’ll be able to post questions that you want me to ask guests or questions directly for me via the podcast website, my newsletter, Write Medicine Insider, and LinkedIn. 

And talking of the newsletter, in 2024 you’ll be able to listen to an audio version as an alternative to the email version. Less to process in your inbox, and more accessible for listening on the go. 

4. Growth

You might have noticed that I’ve been saying “we” a lot. That’s because I hired a podcast manager in January of this year. One of my goals for 2023 was to grow the podcast and reach more listeners in CME/CPD and perhaps beyond. Aleea from Golden Goose Creative has been instrumental in that respect. She helps me edit and schedule the podcast and stay on track with all the production tasks necessary to publish regularly and consistently. Golden Goose Creative has also been helping me build out a YouTube channel for Write Medicine, which we’ll continue to do in 2024.

Because of you, dear listener, Write Medicine continues to get a 5-star rating on Spotify with positive reviews about why you like the podcast. Until recently we had consistent 5-star ratings on Apple podcasts too until someone left a 1 star rating with no review. Hmmm, that stung, I’ll tell you, and sent me crashing into a bit of a spin for a hot minute. But I’m going to be sharing an episode next year on what that lonely, single star taught me about feedback.

By the way, if you have not yet reviewed the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I have a huge favor to ask. Please do this! Your 5-star reviews help other listeners find the podcast and, I’m not going to lie to you, they also keep my spirits up. 

And despite that star, Write Medicine is streaming in 25 countries and being shared widely via direct links. So please keep sharing the podcast with your peers, colleagues and clients! Because of your sharing, podcast listeners grew by 647% this year. 

If you would like to partner with Write Medicine to channel your message to CME/CPD professionals, then let’s talk. My email is in the show notes. 

Preview of Next Season (3-4 minutes)

In 2024, we’ll be making some other changes to the podcast too, based on your survey responses, our conversations on LinkedIn and over email, and what we’re seeing in the podcast industry. 

First, we’re launching a new website with improved functionality to help you more easily find and share episodes. For each episode, you’ll still have show notes, a transcript, and time stamps. But now each episode will be categorized for easier search and retrieval. You’ll be able to rate and review the podcast directly from the website in addition to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave messages, insights, or questions for me.

The second change for 2024 is that the podcast is now part of the Health Podcast Network. This network is home to the best health podcasts on the planet, including podcasts on digital health, health IT, health policy, mental health, patient education, and professional development. Podcasts like White Coats of the Round Table, At the Core of Care, and the Podcast by Kevin MD. Joining a network was a goal for me this year, and I’m delighted that we found and have been welcomed into the Health Podcast Network family.

And third, many of you want conversations with guests that are even more practical, exposure to examples of real-life situations in CME/CPD, and occasionally, shorter, bite-sized episodes. We can do this for sure! 

Looking ahead, 2024 promises to be a pivotal year for CME/CPD and for Write Medicine. We'll explore digital imprint—what it is and why it matters, strategies for building a global CME/CE program, research findings on CME/CPD professionalization, imposter syndrome in CME/CPD, what’s going on accreditation-wise in Europe, and much, much more. 

We'll include guests who are at the forefront of these issues—your peers, colleagues, and clients and perhaps you, yes you Write Medicine friend. We’ll also include shorter episodes that specifically speak to medical writers who are interested in specializing in writing CME/CPD content. 

So stay tuned in 2024. 

And if you want to work with me in 2024, I have different options for you.

WriteCME Pro will continue to be the core professional development hub for writers ready to specialize in CME/CPD content along with expanded coaching programs for writers. 

But I’ll also be launching cohort-based program for academics, clinicians, and researchers who are looking for done-with-you support to launch and grow and sustainable CME/CPD writing business. More information on that to come in the new year. 

In January, I’m offering a podcast intensive for program planners, scientific directors, education strategists, and writers who are involved in CME/CPD podcast production or thinking about it. As we knowm podcasts are such a great way for health professionals to share their real-world expertise—especially so when they are guided by people who know both the disease area and how to tease out learning and clinical practice implications. But there’s very little guidance out there for folks who are interviewing or prepping faculty for podcasts. 

So in this hands-on workshop you’ll learn:

• Techniques for voice warm-up and addressing nerves
• Interview technique, pacing + cadence
• How to create podcast scripts
• Equipment, editing tools, and much more. 

Doors open early January.

6. Closing Remarks 

That’s it from me for season 6 and for 2023. I want to thank you, Write Medicine friend, from the bottom of my heart for listening and for your continued support and engagement to keep going with this podcast. Creating each episode involves extensive research and preparation, recording and editing, and building out additional materials like the show notes and resources to support your learning like the CME/CPD Creator’s Inclusion Toolkit, the Gen-AI Cheat Sheet, and of course the WriteCME Roadmap. 

And here’s the digital goodie bag. If you do not yet have these resources, then head on over to my website to get access to these and to an exclusive podcast feed with 4 relaxing practices to help you unwind over the holiday period, replenish your energy, and plant seeds for your own growth in 2024. I’ll share the link in the show notes. 

Thank you for joining us this season. I’m signing off for now, but I’m already eager to reconnect with you in 2024. Nuria Negrao returns as our first guest to complete the trilogy of our series on generative AI in CME/CPD. 

Until then, stay curious, keep learning, and go gently.