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Getting Your CME Credits With CMEfy And Adaptrack With Dr. Brian Cohen

Posted on January 26, 2022

MSP 73 | CME Credits

 

Continuing medical education (CME) credits are the sort of things that you forget about and then a few weeks before they’re due, you remember and start to panic. With CMEfy and Adaptrack, you don’t have to worry about these things anymore. You’d be able to make these micro-learnings that you have within your day count as credits. The goal is to make it as seamless as possible. Join your host Samuel Gbadebo as he talks to the Chief Medical Officer of Adaptrack, Dr. Brian Cohen. Learn more about CMEfy, Adaptrack, and how to use them.

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Getting Your CME Credits With CMEfy And Adaptrack With Dr. Brian Cohen

We have with us a very innovative guest, Dr. Brian Cohen. He is an Anesthesiologist and Founding Partner at Miami Anesthesia Services. What he has done with his cofounders is created a platform where providers can get CMEs. Imagine being a provider with a podcast, and you are giving knowledge on this platform simply by tuning in, reading the episode, giving their opinions, and what they have learned, they are able to get CME credits. Imagine being able to provide that service.

Think about this and extrapolate it out to the entire medical sales space, pharmaceutical medical device, and everything else included. There is a lot of value there. You can already picture it. That is what we are going to be talking about with Dr. Brian Cohen and his company called CMEfy. It is fascinating what is present and what the future is about to bring in the world we are diving into.

Dr. Cohen, how are we doing?

I’m good. How are you, Sam?

I’m fantastic. Why don’t you tell us who you are and what you do? 

I’m Brian Cohen, Practicing Anesthesiologist, Cofounder, and Administrative Chief of Miami Anesthesia Services. I’m also Cofounder and Chief Medical Officer of Adaptrack and CMEfy.

What is CMEfy?

We are an engagement and learning platform that sits in between the host-clinicians industry and captures insights and rewards with the currency of Continuing Medical Education credits.

We met and talked a little bit about this. I was fascinated by a service that allows any conversation between a provider and another provider or provider in a company where information is disseminated to be used as CME credits. I want to believe that majority of my audience does not know anything about that, so talk to us about what that means.

MSP 73 | CME Credits

CME Credits: CMEfy is an engagement platform and a learning platform. It sits in between hosts and clinicians. It captures insights and rewards with their currency of continuing medical education credits.

 

We will start with some of the boring backgrounds on Continuing Medical Education credits, and wewill talk about the fun part. This is one of those industries that have fallen into a pattern based on what we accepted in the past. Continuing Medical Education credits, like almost all professional industries, are one of those required aspects of being a physician, in healthcare, or a practicing clinician where you are going to have a minimum number of requirements required each year, whether it is on a 2, 5 or 10-year cycle. The average is about twenty per year.

It is one of those things where we are out in life, in our practice, or seeing patients. We have different deadlines that exist for state requirements, state licensing, and also for specialties. You usually get that at the last month or a few weeks, and you are like, “I have got 40 credits I need to get done,” and it becomes this rapid rush of, “Where do I find them? How much is this going to cost me? How much time is this going to take?” That is one aspect. The other aspect is in the traditional sense of organized grand rounds.

When we are going to plan out those grand rounds, it is going to take 4, 5, or 6 weeks. You get your material, submit it to the department, they review it, they come back and tell you what you can and can’t say. Eventually, you walk away with the link that you can let your learners click on and sign-in on the paper when they get there.

At lunch, they sit for an hour, listen and maybe pick something up. The thought is the system is a little bit broken in the sense of how we function these days, the responsibilities that are on the plate of practicing clinicians, time constraints, attention span, the rapid change of knowledge, and how it is being produced out there.

We don’t need to rely on the classic textbook to go back to and learn anymore. We are learning every day, every conversation we have, and that is what we started to lean on. We don’t have to continue with this same mentality and confine ourselves to one-hour grand rounds in order to come away with one credit of learning.

People don't need to rely on the classic textbook to learn from anymore. Learning has changed these days and exists in so many mediums. Click To Tweet

As a physician, I can text my buddies from residence. You would say, “What do you think about this case?” I can stop the surgeon in the hall or chat in the OR about something about learning. I can listen to a podcast on my way to work about some of the advancements in my specialty. I can check out a webinar over lunch. There are so many different ways we are learning these days. They are in so many different mediums in so many different time spans. The idea of CMEfy was, “Why aren’t we getting credit for those learning moments?” That is what allowed us to evolve into that space.

There is so much information being disseminated now to so many different mediums, podcasts, or a conversation. I still want to understand how CMEfy captures this and uses it for CMEs for people. Give us an example of what that looks like. 

What we started with as a company is Adaptrack. Adaptrack is a platform that is ACCME accredited with content and a user experience that produces CME credits. We built Adaptrack with the sole purpose of creating a positive change in behavior for practicing clinicians to de-risk themselves. This came from historical data from the med-mal world, burnout data, moral injury, work-life balance, and administrative challenges we have with documentation and team-based work.

We could not come and present this in an hour-long or 40 slide PowerPoint presentation because my job as the physician voice in this company was to say, “We don’t have the bandwidth to sit through that right now. We need to know this information, so tell it to me the way in which my brain works.” I spend my days in the operating room with surgeons. You have got twenty seconds to get that point across before we move on to the next topic.

I love these guys, but it is like talking to toddlers throughout the day. Hit me with the important stuff, and let’s keep going. We challenged ourselves to adopt that as the way in which we were going to communicate this knowledge, material, or content to physicians. What that meant was we are going to do these microlearnings. These microlearnings are very short, but they have options to dive deeper into them and look as to where that content came from.

MSP 73 | CME Credits

CME Credits: Continuing medical education credits are one of those required aspects of being a physician. You’re going to need to have a minimum number of credits required each year.

 

The key to microlearning generating a significant amount or half a CME credit is based on the user experience and the behavioral economics of how everyone learns. Sitting in the mindset of the physician is we want something quick to learn, track that learning, and tie it to reward. How are we going to track it? We are going to have you journal or reflect on it. What we all do is sit and text, “How does this apply to you and your day-to-day? I gave you a small piece of information.

Now, tell me in your own words, how does this apply to you? How are you going to apply this to your practice?” When you do that, hit save on that reflection, and you got half a CME credit. There is the reward. That user experience, which is highly supported by the AMA who grants the AMA PRA Category 1 CME credits, embraces this reflective learning.

What reflective learning does is not only does it allow us to generate these types of credits, but it captures some cool data and insights. The other principle we stand on is it is not our data. That is your data. We don’t want your data because it is yours, but you can use or share that anonymously with the hosts of the content. It is yours to decide. What we found was physicians appreciated this type of content because we never learned how not to get sued until we got sued. By that point, it is too late.

You don’t learn how not to burn out until you feel like you are burnt out and you don’t want to hear how not to burn out because you are gone. We wanted to get this out in front of the physicians before these happened and create these behavioral changes based on nudge theory and these micro habits that they come across, and it was very well accepted. The challenge became, “We gave busy people one more thing to do. Our whole goal was to take away this annoyance or extra task that’s on our list of to-do by the end of the year.”

Where we hit a transition was in the pandemic, but this transition was when Clubhouse came about. We jumped on Clubhouse when it first came out, and I’m like, “There are 400 clinicians sitting in a room together talking about the good stuff.” These are learning moments. Why can’t we bring our learning experience, attach it to these moments and CMEfy these Clubhouse conversations?

If you sort of want an all-you-can-eat CME buffet, you can use the Adaptrack platform itself. Click To Tweet

That is where the birthplace of CMEfy was. We built a platform that essentially took a CME accredited library and brought them to the right place at the right time. If you have a purpose or a reason to reflect on what you learned and apply to you or your day-to-day, that process and reflection can generate CME. You now gain the ability to CMEfy any of these learning moments. The next challenge became, “How quickly can we do this?”

I’m trying to get the actual experience for the user. The provider that has bought into this has said, “I’m going to get my credits to CMEfy.” Are they going on the platform to find the information or are you giving them a list of information to go to where the CMEfy links might be? How do they get access to the information to know that they can CMEfy it and get CME credits? 

There are two routes. If you want an all-you-can-eat CME buffet, you can use the Adaptrack platform itself. As a clinician, you sign in with your NPI number that targets the specialty that you practice in and limits the content to be specific and relevant to what you would want to know about. Where it gets fun is when you are on the side of being a catalyst for some of these conversations and get a host account on CMEfy.

As a physician with a voice, for example, maybe I’m doing a podcast, hosting that Clubhouse room or happened to be a guy in my group who likes to talk a lot. I now have the ability to create these links that used to be generated by the CME department. You are able to generate a link within 30 seconds on CMEfy and can share that link with your learners.

MSP 73 | CME Credits

CME Credits: Adaptrack was made with the sole purpose of creating a positive change in behavior for practicing clinicians. This is used to de-risk themselves.

 

If I’m a practicing clinician or a colleague of this physician’s voice that is hosting a conversation, the way I get CME, engage and find out about this is they are pushing this out saying, “You can learn with me for free and you come away with the CME.” It is tied in very closely to that learning experience. That was the key. We wanted it to integrate into where the learner was to give that host the ability to push it out there easily to share with their colleagues and the people that are listening and learning with them.

That was part one with Dr. Brian Cohen. The future is here and the things that we are able to do is pretty unbelievable. To be able to create CME credits for providers through providers, through a medium like a podcast is impressive stuff. For those reading and thinking about entering this world in pharmaceutical sales, medical device sales, be somewhat connected to the space and be an individual contributor, you need to make sure you visit EvolveYourSuccess.com and select Attain A Medical Sales Role.

You are going to be prompted to fill out a very short application that is going to give us a little bit about you, you get to have a conversation with one of the people from our staff here at Evolve Your Success and help you get on the right track to getting the career that you have always wanted to be a part of. 

Why wait? Maybe you have not been getting the interviews or can’t get past that 2nd or 3rd round. Stop waiting for it. Get the help you deserve and get into this position you deserve, especially if you know that is something you want to do, and it has been a passion for yours for a while. For those of you that are reading this, and you are saying to yourself, “There are some innovative things happening out there that are changing the game as far as what experience my customers get to have when they work with me.” Visit EvolveYourSuccess.com and select Improve Sales Performance.

We have sales training programs that can give you that cutting edge and also a way to do things like social media selling, where you can create a brand on the LinkedIn platform and become a voice that invites customers to you. Don’t wait for these things. This is still the beginning of 2022. You can still make these things happen. Get on it now. We always do our best to bring you guests who have new innovations, are changing the game, and doing things differently in this space, so make sure you tune in for part 2 of this episode.

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About Dr. Brian Cohen

MSP 73 | CME Credits14 years clinical experience as practicing anesthesiologist, Risk Specialist as Medical Director (Anesthesia, Integrative Medicine & Pain), Entrepreneur (personalized patient care company in FL), Co-Founder and CMO of Adaptrack and CMEfy.

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