Adrienne Stevens, EdD, MBA, Vice President and Head of Scientific Strategy at Healio Strategic Solutions shares how her passion for dance, and her interest in the mechanics of movement, physical therapy, anatomy, and physiology has translated into a career as a medical communicator. Dance requires precision, and that’s what Adrienne practices in her work. 

Welcoming Adrienne Stevens, PhD in physiology, to the podcast 

[00:02] Some of the things Adrienne  learned in the process of writing her dissertation that fuel her approach in healthcare communication.

[00:04] Some of the key differences Adrienne sees between scientific writing and business writing. 

 [00:09] Key types of communication that work with physicians and other healthcare workers.

 [00:13:25] The importance of motivational interviewing.

[0015:29] Differences in the kind of education strategy and format that MSLs respond to compared with clinicians. 

[00:18:22]  Are we interactive enough in the education we design?

[00:20:36] Communication in obesity education.

Resources
Healio Strategic Solutions
Performing Health
Motivational interviewing 

Connect with Adrienne: LinkedIn
Connect with Alex: Thistleeditorial.com

Podcast Team
Host: Alexandra Howson PhD
Sound Engineer: Suzen Marie
Shownotes: Anna Codina

📍Grab the WriteCME Roadmap
⭐ Review the podcast
🗞️ Biweekly Newsletter with tips and resources to enrich your CME content niche
➡️ Join WriteCME Pro for ongoing professional development
🌐 Podcast website
🎙️ Share the podcast

Introduction

Amanda Kaczerski, ATC, MS, CHCP is Vice Principal of Educational Strategy at the Academy for Continued Healthcare Learning. We first met at the beginning of 2020, feels like 100 years ago now, when we both co-presented as faculty in a prep course for the Alliance's CHCP exam. I'm delighted to have her on the show today, we're going to talk about instructional design, and geek out a little bit and some of those instructional design parameters.

Chapters
00:04:19 From field sales to learning design

00:06:11 Pay attention to clinician goals

00:11:00 Dealing with online fatigue

00:14:55 Addressing the "shiny objects"

00:19:46 Changes in how people approach education design

00:22:24 Leveraging a range of virtual learning approaches for CME/CPD

00:27:15 Key Take Aways

Connect with Amanda: LinkedIn
Connect with Alex: Thistleeditorial.com

Podcast Team
Host: Alexandra Howson PhD
Sound Engineer: Suzen Marie
Shownotes: Anna Codina

📍Grab the WriteCME Roadmap
⭐ Review the podcast
🗞️ Biweekly Newsletter with tips and resources to enrich your CME content niche
➡️ Join WriteCME Pro for ongoing professional development
🌐 Podcast website
🎙️ Share the podcast

Introduction
Monique Johnson MD is the Medical Director at Physicians' Education Resource and has more than 20 years in the CME field. Monique shares some of the challenges clinicians face when they're in the healthcare industry, why she's passionate about having better education within this field, and how to overcome common structural barriers in healthcare that block health professionals from learning.

Chapters

[02:03] A little bit about Monique and how she got started in the medical education field. 

[06:37] Monique shares some of the challenges she had on the administration side of things when she was in the medical field. 

[11:20] Monique gives an example of how education can address structural healthcare barriers. 

[14:54] Some 'common facts' that medical professionals use and reference all the time can actually be outdated or flat out not true.

[18:00] The value of education on social determinants of health.

[21:40] What has changed in 2020 and 2021 on how to best approach training clinicians? 

[27:22] How should the CME industry best help their clinicians?

Resources
Williams DR, Cooper LA. Reducing racial inequities in health: Using what we already know to take action. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2019;16(4):606.

Brewer LC et al. Association of race consciousness with the patient-physician relationship, medication adherence, and blood pressure in urban primary care patients.  Am J Hypertens. 2013;26(11):14-152.

Connect with Monique: Gotoper.com & LinkedIn
Connect with Alex: Thistleeditorial.com

Podcast Team
Host: Alexandra Howson PhD
Sound Engineer: Suzen Marie
Shownotes: Anna Codina

📍Grab the WriteCME Roadmap
⭐ Review the podcast
🗞️ Biweekly Newsletter with tips and resources to enrich your CME content niche
➡️ Join WriteCME Pro for ongoing professional development
🌐 Podcast website
🎙️ Share the podcast

Summary
Steve Powell DHA is the CEO and Founder of Synensys Global and is a recognized leader in performance improvement. He has led programs in the US Navy, commercial airline industry, and the healthcare industry for more than 30 years and is passionate about patient safety, quality control, and patient-centered care improvements.

Steve shares what he learned in safety when he was a Navy Pilot and how these experiences crossover nicely into the medical industry. He also shares his thoughts on what makes a team successful when it comes to patient handoffs, and the 5 key principles to a high-reliability organization.

Resources
Institute of Medicine
TeamSTEPPS
Kohn KT,  Corrigan JM, Donaldson MS, eds. To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Washington, DC: Committee on Quality Health Care in America, Institute of Medicine: National Academy Press; 1999.
Nash D, Beliveau ME.  Two lessons hospitals can learn from their COVID response. MedPage Today. Dec 7, 2020.

Connect with Steve: Synensysglobal.com + LinkedIn
Connect with Alex: Thistleeditorial.com + LinkedIn

Podcast Team
Host: Alexandra Howson PhD
Sound Engineer: Suzen Marie
Shownotes: Anna Codina

📍Grab the WriteCME Roadmap
⭐ Review the podcast
🗞️ Biweekly Newsletter with tips and resources to enrich your CME content niche
➡️ Join WriteCME Pro for ongoing professional development
🌐 Podcast website
🎙️ Share the podcast

Introduction
Today my guest is Nina Taylor, Vice President of Learning and Education at American Society for Radiation Oncology. I first met Nina Taylor in 2018 at an Alliance Quality and Innovation Summit in Park City, Utah.  She and Andrew Chacko, who was a guest in episode 2 of Write Medicine, were presenters in a session on designing innovative education programs.  Nina talks about her work in continuing education and how she uses active listening, social learning, and a sense of fun to create immersive and accessible education for healthcare clinicians.

Ley Take Aways

* How Nina got started in CME.

* What really goes behind the scenes in building out engaging adult learning materials.

* Nina challenges you to think about your leadership ethos. 

* Nina shares what her experience was like working in several different medical societies and some of the key takeaways she’s learned over the years. 

* When you’re in an association or a society, you’re seen as a peer and medical faculty are happy to help you because everyone is fighting for the same team.

* How does the American Society for Radiation Oncology approach clinician education? 

* Nina shares some of the challenges she faced trying to incorporate virtual technology into her department. 

* What does a dynamic and immersive educational experience look like? Nina shares some examples. 

* Covid is hard for everyone right now. Humans are social creatures and we need connection. 

* Nina believes every meeting should have a virtual component. It just opens the doors to so many people who weren’t able to come before due to financial or geographical restraints. 

* Virtual is here to stay! Education in any form is always a positive. 

* What should practitioners be thinking about when it comes to the future of the CME field? 

* We really have to practice what we preach. Sometimes our learning materials are so dry and dull! 

* What is the Psychiatric Innovation Lab all about? 

* What’s Nina looking forward to in 2021? 

Summary
Nina's experience at an HBCU gave her direct exposure to a dynamic learning environment filled with opportunities to teach and facilitate that she has been able to pull into her professional life and use to support her work with faculty. And her leadership style of leading from the middle is invested in uplifting team members, elevating their skills, and fostering an ecosystem of sharing information and a climate in which team members take ownership of their own work, and not the work that someone else has determined for them. 

The parallel here for me is adult learning. How many programs in CME/CPD really allow learners to take ownership of their own learning? And to what extent does the shift to a virtual learning open a door to that kind of experience?  Nina is clear that it is possible to craft dynamic, immersive, experiences that offer room for learners to curate their own learning in a virtual environment that has a clear esthetic design, rapid interactive activities, and networking opportunities.  She's also clear that

📍Grab the WriteCME Roadmap
⭐ Review the podcast
🗞️ Biweekly Newsletter with tips and resources to enrich your CME content niche
➡️ Join WriteCME Pro for ongoing professional development
🌐 Podcast website
🎙️ Share the podcast

Regina Sih-Meynier is an authentic leader with expertise in developing and executing strategic plans for Medical Affairs. She is passionate about ensuring patients receive the best available healthcare and she leverages her intuitive sense, her ability to identify problems, and her creativity to create systems and processes to solve those problems. She has over 20  years of experience in the healthcare field and understands the importance of demonstrating impact in patient care. 

Regina talks with Alex about how to create education content that supports authentic empowerment and transformational learning. 

Key Takeaways

[0:55] How did Regina get involved in medical education? Like so many of us in this field, her career path wasn’t exactly linear.

[4:20] What is authentic empowerment? 

[6:25] Regina loves to use her intuitive sense to guide her in writing highly educational and engaging patient materials. 

[7:25] Tapping into your intuition is something corporate likes to stay away from because you can’t exactly see it or touch it. However, you’re missing out on a whole superpower if you ignore it. 

[9:35] How can you tap into your intuition and really listen to your inner voice? 

[13:30] There’s a real art to developing care that is both science-based and gut-based. 

[14:15] Why does corporate like to avoid people’s intuition? 

[18:35] Glennon Doyle’s inner voice. Ideas and solutions have their own energy. Regina explains what she means by this.

[22:00] Regina shares what she’s learned from working with a life coach and how it’s given her a new way to approach and solve problems. 

[25:00] What is Regina’s company, Oh Universe, about? 

[29:25] What are some of the benefits of taking on a more authentic empowerment stance in the medical education space? 

[32:40] Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not real! We don’t always have all the answers. 

[34:25] Regina shares her morning rituals.

Resources
Connect with Regina: www.oh-universe.com, LinkedIn, Facebook
Doyle G. Untamed. The Dial Press. 2020.
Gilbert E. Big Magic.  CreativeLiving Beyond Fear. Riverhead Books. 2016. 
Gladwell M. The Tipping Point. Bay Back Books, 2002.
Sih-Meynier R. An opportunity for organizational leaders and decision-makers to step in and protect the well-being of their people. Thrive Global.  October 4, 2020.
Thaler RH, Sunstein CR.

📍Grab the WriteCME Roadmap
⭐ Review the podcast
🗞️ Biweekly Newsletter with tips and resources to enrich your CME content niche
➡️ Join WriteCME Pro for ongoing professional development
🌐 Podcast website
🎙️ Share the podcast

Scott Kober MBA is the Managing Partner of Excalibur Medical Education, which launched in January 2021. He has more than two decades of experience designing and developing content for CME activities and provides high-quality innovative education for today's healthcare providers. In this episode, Scott underscores the different aspects writers need to think about when developing medical content, especially if they do not have a medical or science background. Scott also shares some of his tried and true tips on how to create engaging medical pieces that are simple and easy to understand.

Key Takeaways

Resources
Thistleeditorial.com
CMEpalooza
Connect with Scott: Excalibur Medical Education & LinkedIn
Get access to Write Medicine podcast updates—and more—with Thistle Insights.

Quotes

 “What does it all mean? This can be challenging because we are not health care professionals, we’re not the ones seeing these patients. So we have to take our best guess and work with our faculty.”

“Make your materials interesting. No one wants to sit through the monotony of study and data. You got to figure out a way to translate the information in a way that’s going to resonate with people.”

“If you can be entertaining and still get your message across, that’s going to be the perfect way to do it. However, it doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people.”

Podcast Team
Host: Alexandra Howson PhD
Sound Engineer: Suzen Marie
Shownotes: Anna Codina

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify

📍Grab the WriteCME Roadmap
⭐ Review the podcast
🗞️ Biweekly Newsletter with tips and resources to enrich your CME content niche
➡️ Join WriteCME Pro for ongoing professional development
🌐 Podcast website
🎙️ Share the podcast

Dr. Genevieve Long is a medical writer and editor specializing in patient education, plain language, health literacy and marketing communications. She began her medical writing career as a manuscript editor at Oregon Health & Science University and has more than 25 years of healthcare experience. Dr. Genevieve has been active in the American Medical Writers Association since 2002 and is the past president of AMWA-Northwest. She also teaches at the University of Chicago Graham School on the subjects of medical writing and editing.

In this week’s episode, Dr.  Long shares:

Key Takeaways

[3:38] A little bit about Dr. Genevieve and how she got into the field of patient education.

[9:02] Dr. Genevieve shares what people need to be thinking about when they begin to write patient education materials. 

You might not realize it, but you have a lot of power and what you do/say can hurt the patient. 

For many health care professionals, the world of medicine is a comfortable place. For patients and their loved ones, it is not. It’s a traumatic experience for them. 

[13:16] When it comes to creating content, you want to focus on the most important content first. People have short attention spans! 

Get clear on what’s a ‘need to know’ vs. a ‘nice to know’. 

Should all of your words be short? Dr. Genevieve says no, but spacing plays a big role in readability. 

When it comes to adult learning, the more you’re engaged and interacting with the content, the better of an understanding you’ll get. Dr. Genevieve tries to incorporate this principal into her classes. 

[19:19] Patients who are engaged with their own healthcare journey tend to do better in their recovery. 

When faculty talks about ‘empowerment’, what do they really mean when it comes to patient education? 

[22:31] How are educators and providers thinking about information sharing and content creation in today’s landscape? 

[25:09] Dr. Genevieve shares the different types of materials she’s worked on over the years to make content more digestible. Informational videos are doing exceedingly well. 

[30:00] What resources are out there that content creators can leverage when creating simple and easy to understand patient education materials?

[33:45] Dr. Genevieve shares her tips on building a more empathic approach to her writing. 

Spend time with patients! Your materials will immensely improve. 

[37:25] The more people we can bring into science, the less fear people might have on certain medical procedures. 

[40:00] What don’t we do enough of in patient education? Dr. Genevieve shares her thoughts on usability testing.  

Resources

Thistleeditorial.com
Connect with Dr. Genevieve: Bridgehealthcomm.com

📍Grab the WriteCME Roadmap
⭐ Review the podcast
🗞️ Biweekly Newsletter with tips and resources to enrich your CME content niche
➡️ Join WriteCME Pro for ongoing professional development
🌐 Podcast website
🎙️ Share the podcast

My conversation today is with Dr. Andrew Chacko, a psychiatrist and leader in healthcare innovation. Andrew uses his medical experience to teach others how to become design thinkers using cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts (proposals for new products, buildings, machines, etc.) are developed. He is passionate about transforming healthcare into the vital, rewarding, and life-changing practice that it can be for patient, provider, and support professionals alike.

Show Notes/Highlights

[04:43] - Design thinking applied to problems in healthcare.

[09:37] - Design thinking and problems caused for healthcare by COVID-19.

[14:16] - How does design thinking get systems (and leaders within) to start thinking about the people who support those systems?

[19:10] - The synergy between design thinking and other ongoing healthcare initiatives e.g., CME/CPD. 

[31:18] - The application of design thinking to clinician education.

Where to connect with Andrew

WEBSITE: https://www.drchacko.com/

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/chacko_md/?hl=en

Here’s the Medium story Andrew mentioned.

Articles on Design Thinking in Medical Education

Sandars J, Goh P-S. Design Thinking in Medical Education: The Key Features and Practical Application. J Med Ed Curr Devel. 2020. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2382120520926518

Gottlieb M, Wagner E, Wagner A, et al. Applying Design Thinking Principles to Curricular Development in Medical Education. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/aet2.10003

McLaughlin J, Wolcott MD, Hubbard D, et al. A qualitative review of the design thinking framework in health professions education. BMC Medical Education. 2019;19(98): https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-019-1528-8

📍Grab the WriteCME Roadmap
⭐ Review the podcast
🗞️ Biweekly Newsletter with tips and resources to enrich your CME content niche
➡️ Join WriteCME Pro for ongoing professional development
🌐 Podcast website
🎙️ Share the podcast

Audrie Tornow is Managing Partner at Excalibur Medical Education. We talked about the role of creativity, intentionality, and failure in designing education content for clinicians in healthcare. 

 01:27 Introductions with Audrie Tornow

02:31 Audrie talks about her beginnings and journey into medical education: No one majored in CME…

04:34 Does anyone remember transparencies? 

05:50 How has your background in English informed the way you approach education design and delivery?

 “When we plan education, it has become something where everything has a purpose because cost is affiliated with it. Planning it out and knowing what we want, starting with the end in mind, has become more critical than ever.”

07:23 How do you personally define good learning for adults, especially for those working in healthcare?

 09:23 What’s your sense of what learners are looking for in their education during the COVID-19 pandemic?

 “We talk about online fatigue, but right now so many providers and partners out there are seeing larger metrics than ever in online activities. And so, we’re showing we’re versatile. We’re showing we can adapt.”

 14:11 What are some of the shifts you’ve seen in the last few months that really try to creatively engage with a) where learners are and the challenges they may be facing in their personal lives and b) getting around that virtual approach?

18:06 How was the ability of educators within the CME world changed in order to prepare them to work more fluidly and intimately with partners?

 21:53 How effective do you think our field is in openly discussing failure?

 “I think people think that demonstrating failure means you aren’t a trusted partner. That you aren’t a successful business. And that’s definitely a perception that’s valid, but I think there’s so much to be learned by saying ‘I tried this, here was the idea. And it didn’t work.’ And it might be that next partner that says, ‘Actually if you had just done this.’ They might be the missing piece.”

 24:02 You talked about the potential reemergence of print as something that might be increasingly appealing to learners. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Resources

Eric Weiner. The Geography of Bliss. Twelve. 2009.

Transparencies

Results of the Alliance 2016 Environmental Scan. Almanac.

Ben and Jerry Flavor Graveyard

Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education. ACCME Data Report 2019. 

Support the show

📍Grab the WriteCME Roadmap

⭐ Review the podcast

🗞️ Biweekly Newsletter with tips and resources to enrich your CME content niche

➡️ Join WriteCME Pro for ongoing professional development

🌐 Podcast website

🎙️ Share the podcast