RT to WIN $100! Your Fun Guide to CME Outcomes Publishing

One of the things I love about the CME field is how the landscape is constantly changing. There's never a dull moment for a medical writer who develops content for continuing education. That's why I call myself @CME_Scout on Twitter.

@CME_Scout

A good example is the new trend of publishing articles containing outcomes of continuing education interventions in peer-reviewed journals. This trend started a few years ago but now seems to be gaining momentum as more articles about quality improvement (QI) and performance improvement (PI) are published.

As former editor of a peer-reviewed education journal, I think this is a terrific step forward for our profession. So does my friend Sandra Binford, an experienced medical education designer and outcomes researcher who recently won a Rising Star Award from the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions.

Rising star: Sandra Haas Binford, MAEd

Sandra and I are teaming up to offer you a special treat. We plan to give our followers on Twitter a guided tour of this exciting new body of literature. Our back-to-school tour will take the form of a month-long series of daily tweets, from mid-August to mid-September. 

Here's what you can expect if you follow us: I will tweet from August 17 to 31, Sandra will tweet from Sept 1 to 15. Each of our 30 tweets will take you to a different one of our favorite articles, along with a note about why you will find it worth reading. These won't be just any old articles. To be worthy of mention in one of my tweets, an article has to meet my stringent criteria. (Sandra gets to have her own criteria, which she will explain in a separate message.)

To be the topic of one of my tweets, an article must be:

1) published in a peer-reviewed journal
2) indexed in PubMed

3) dated 2010 or later

4) available as free full text

5) an outcomes report from a continuing education initiative (QI or PI initiatives are OK, too)

6) focused on clinician education, rather than patient education
7) written in English (!)

Our guided tour will interest anyone who is curious to learn more about what’s involved in getting educational outcomes data published in the peer-reviewed literature. This includes my fellow medical writers and editors who want to learn more about the process, as well as 

• research analysts
• program managers
• medical directors
• proposal writers
• continuing educators
• publishing house executives
• medical education company officers

To give the tour lasting value, we will be curating our tweets in an accessible web-based archive for later reference. (Sandra loves this part -- I keep telling her she missed her calling as a librarian.) 

To make our project interactive, we will give you a chance to express your opinion on each article. Just edit your retweet, or leave a comment when you see the note about the article posted on one of our blogs.

Retweet to WIN!

Now for the really fun part: We are going to make this bit of a contest, where you can actually earn money while following us on Twitter. Each person who retweets one of our daily article tweets will have his or her name entered in a drawing (max one entry per person per day). At the end of 30 days, we will draw 2 names (Twitter handles) at random from among all the entries. 

FIRST PRIZE: The Twitter handle with the larger following will win a $100 Amazon gift card courtesy of Harting Communications LLC. 

SECOND PRIZE: The Twitter handle with the smaller following will win a $50 Amazon gift card courtesy of Full Circle Clinical Education.

Be sure to follow one of us when you retweet so we can notify you via direct message (DM) if you win!