What CME providers should learn from COVID

The world of digital advertising is changing as the battle for the hearts and minds of customers rages on. According to one recent report, making connections with the new digital consumer is getting a lot more challenging.

"The attention of consumers in the digital world is shifting in important ways. Their attention and experience are migrating to mobile at a rapid rate. At the same time, the user experience in the mobile environment is shifting — from Web- and browser-based to a world of apps, streaming platforms, e-sports and gaming, podcasting, and e-commerce and messaging platforms. As a result, activities, content, communication, and transactions are taking place inside a large number of different consumer interfaces — and, increasingly, so is the marketing that follows and enables all these elements. Meanwhile, heightened concerns over privacy are pushing publishers and consumers away from the browser-based (and hence easy to track) model and toward a new paradigm. Behavior that takes place inside apps, or inside streaming platforms and walled content gardens, is not shared widely. That makes it more challenging for marketers to assemble the full picture of what an individual consumer — or a group of consumers on a single platform — is doing. To add to the complexity, domestic platforms such as VK.com in Russia or Tencent in China dominate their large home markets. And so marketers need to master an expanding array of platforms in order to reach global consumers. New methods of connecting with consumers on all those channels have also grown in prominence, including the use of influencers, content marketing, and experiential marketing."

The same challenges apply to providing mobile and digital personalized continuous continuing medical education (PC CME). Trends are :

1. Having a digical CME strategy that combines face to face events with 24/7 accessible mobile digital delivery
2. Decreasing meeting attendance in some areas due to the cost and substitutes such as virtual conferences, group videoconferencing sites and team communiations and collaboration platforms such as Slack/Zoom, Skype, Webex, Go to Meeting and Google Hangouts.
3. Changing knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies to win the 4th industrial revolution
4. Changing regulations about state required CME and MOC requirements
5. Changes in the demands for high value CME delivering quality, affordability, convenience and impact on one's practice that meets compliance requirements
6. Competing trends in the need for socializing face to face and social media interaction and the use of influencers (we call them key opinion leaders).
7. Creating a continuous connection strategy
8. Digitizing the CME industry
9. Data driven analytics particularly as they apply to non-technical domain subjects. How do you measure the impact of a CME program on increasing your empathy, creativity, communications, collaboration and creative problem solving skills?
10. Making CME work such that it changes undesirable patient and sick care professional behavior
11. Personalized physician programming driven by AI
12. How to integrate techmed and biopharma digital advertising and sponsorship with digital CME. Successful integration of new channels also enables companies to expand their reach to deliver scientific data to HCPs may have been previously left behind in communication strategies. Today, HCPs who fall within white space territories are unable to meet with reps and medical science liaisons (MSLs). Often, these HCPs are located outside the influence of global academic KOLs or key HCP populations prioritized for top tier events and conferences. By opening up engagement to a wider population of attendees, virtual events enable greater information sharing across the healthcare ecosystem.
13. Closing the global sickcare digital divide
14. Providing CME for attending non-sick care events that interface and have potential innovation applications in medicine. Since Sickcare USA cannot be fixed from inside, we need to encourage outside in participation and collaboration.
15. CME using emerging technologies like simulators, VR and AR.
16. Social intelligence CME, where participants learn from each other and create social intelligence and learning and crowd sourcing ideas on social media channels.
17. Improving the before and after CME experience, like arranging travel, planning events and itineraries for family and friends accompanying registrants to meetings, and after event archiving and CME tracking
18. Incorporating users, including patients, into curriculum design and development
19. Offering interprofessional CME

20. Creating programs in biomedical and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship

Universities, medical schools, medical societies and consolidated integrated sick care delivery networks are rethinking how they provide online education to their students, members and employees and mass customize it using data analysis technologies.

COVID has taught higher education teachers, students and administrators a lot of lessons that should be applied to CME providers.

1. There's more to a conference or webinar than PPT slides.
2. The conference should provide a pre-conference and post-conference curated education, resources, networks, mentors, experience , behavior change monitoring platform, peer to peer support and non-clinical subject and career guidance
3. Pay attention to the fact that some people who signed up are burned out and disengaged, have Zoom fatigue, and are only attending because they need the CME credits to comply with certification, privileges, licensure or other mandates. In addition, they have a CME benefit paid for by their employer and have to use it or lose it.
4. COVID too shall pass. The result is unpredictable spanning the spectrum from a face to face backlash to a hybrid model to online only, depending on the value proposition of each.

Once your antibody titers rise, here is how your next face to face conference will be different.

We are moving quickly away from CME conferences, webcasts and other desktop based distribution channels. The result will be a more customized, mobile data driven product that, hopefully, will be more accessible and have more impact improving learning that translates into value based behavior change and a better healthcare professional learning experience at less cost.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter @SoPEOfficial and Facebook