The days on the calendar are winding down, so it's a good time to reflect on all our team has accomplished in 2019 and look forward to everything we have planned for 2020. It's been another interesting year that has pushed us to be creative and hone our skills, allowing us to excel and surpass expectations of our partners and clients.

Here are the highlights from the last few months and what we're looking forward to in 2020:

LARGE EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVES

Raising the Profile of Rheumatology for Advanced Practice Providers in Training

Our big new project of 2019 in partnership with our friends at the Rheumatology Nurses Society (RNS) was one of our biggest successes. We helped design and develop a robust educational initiative that focused specifically on introducing advanced practice providers (NPs and PAs) in training to the career opportunities available in rheumatology. The workforce struggle — increasing numbers of patients and decreasing numbers of providers — isn't unique to rheumatology, but it is one specialty where it is becoming a major issue that is mushrooming quickly. One of the proposed solutions is to look beyond physicians and to advanced practice providers to fill some of the gaps. But there is a problem — most NP and PA training programs never touch on rheumatology, so graduates are often unaware that this is even a possible career specialty. 

With that challenge, our team planned a robust combination of live, online, and print activities designed specifically to convince NPs and PAs in training (nurses too) to consider a career in rheumatology. You can check out some of the enduring materials our team helped develop on the initiative homepage (https://rnsnurse.org/rns-workforce/). 

We seem to be moving the needle. Our most recent outcomes data showed that more than 70% of NP/PA students who participated in our education were either "interested" or "highly interested" in a potential career in rheumatology. Anecdotally, learners at the live activities have given us some really useful insight into the barriers to a career in rheumatology (ie, "Where do we find out about potential job opportunities?") that we were able to use to plan phase 2 of this education in 2020. We were once again fortunate enough to receive grant funding to pursue the extension of this important initiative, so we'll be rolling out a lot of new stuff in the coming months.

This has been a very interesting project in many ways. The content is not as clinical as most large initiatives we've worked on, and it is really narrowly targeted at a niche audience. We've had to think creatively about the best ways to plan the education and develop useful materials for our audience. So far, so good. 

Handling the Hard Questions: What Our Patients Are Asking Us About Psoriatic Arthritis

It's been about a decade since we initially came upon the "Handling the Hard Questions" concept as an educational format for live and enduring nursing education. But you know what? It works, so why mess with it?

The general idea is to take common (and not-so-common) questions that patients with a specific disease are asking of their healthcare providers and then encourage dialogue into the most appropriate way to respond to those questions. For example, "How did I get 'disease X'?" or "Will my children get 'disease X'?" or "Is there anything that can help me sleep better at night?" We've even been able to crowdsource questions from activity pre-registrants and then specifically tailor components of the education in advance to our expected audience.

Our current initiative, which kicked off thanks to grant funding from multiple supporters in fall 2019 and will run through early 2020, is being developed in collaboration with the Rheumatology Nurses Society and focusing on patients with psoriatic arthritis. It involves live dinner meetings as well as a series of online activities -- we scripted the content for those and remotely oversaw the filming of those in November.   

Dear Diary: Unlocking the Secrets to Better Care of Patients with Psoriatic Arthritis

It's funny where our ideas come from sometimes. In my son's current third-grade class, he is required to write a diary entry of sorts in a notebook every week. The teacher reads his entry and responds with one of her own. It's a way to get students experience with writing, of course, but also to course through their feelings and emotions to share a little about their lives. I think it's a really good idea.

As I was sitting through a presentation last year, I started thinking, "What if this is more than a good idea for 8-year-olds? Can we adapt the general concept to an audience of healthcare professionals?" I started tooling around with things a little more, talked through the idea with my partner (yes, those fine folks at the Rheumatology Nurses Society again), and came up with something that I thought would work. Fortunately, a few grant funders agreed and now we're putting the pieces in place to roll things out in early 2020. There is some programming that needs to be done on the front end before we recruit patients and providers to participate in the diary exchange components that we're currently working on, but this should be a really interesting project. There are live and enduring accredited educational pieces that will be rolling out later in 2020 based in part upon the diary entries that patients submit.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS 

Podcasts

People still listen to podcasts? Really (hey, it was news to me too)? But, yes, apparently they do, and we've been hosting a ton of them (about 40 were recorded just this year!). Kind of scary that millions of people (OK, OK, maybe a couple hundred) are hearing my voice interviewing experts in various medical niches about industry trends, but these are generally "no muss, no fuss" sorts of projects.

In addition to serving as "studio host" for these podcasts, we also typically pre-interview the podcast subjects, develop a script, and then help with post-production editing. The finished product sounds pretty professional.

Here are a few recent examples (note that these are promotional podcasts and not accredited):

• Dermatology Times podcast series (Insight Into the Management of Melasma)
• Contemporary Ob/Gyn podcast series (Better for Women)  

Onsite Technology Help

It's not a service that we really advertise much, but we're being asked increasingly to help other groups with technology solutions. This year, we were onsite coordinating the use of our ARS system (we have about 125 Turning Point keypads) for several meetings. We do all the pre-meeting programming, distribute the keypads, and train faculty on the use of the system. There are some really high-tech ARS solutions our there, and some of there are really great, but they are also expensive. We have worked with numerous clients over the years to figure out the best ways to leverage the capabilities this system offers. We also use PollEverywhere for some smaller live meetings, though that can be unwieldy for a large group, especially when they are eating dinner.

For the second consecutive year, we also helped a client develop a scoring system for a live event and then calculated the results of the competition in real time. We also can do back-end production for any client who wants to use the StreamYard platform to record and capture faculty discussions from remote locations. 

OTHER STUFF

We're nothing if not versatile. Here is what else we recently wrapped up and continue to plug away on:

• We just recently finished up a three-part, case-based series focused on the management of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) for our friends at RedMedEd. The "best" part about these activities? A new drug was approved by the FDA for each disease (one drug for CLL and a different drug for MCL) as we were putting the content together, which meant we had to go back and rewrite material to account for the changes. Yes, we "love" having to do this (I hope I don't have to explain the sarcasm that accompanies the quote marks). This sort of thing happens from time to time unfortunately, so it's just one of those things we need to gracefully accept.
• Our team worked on several more ArcheMedX projects this fall, including a 2-part series for MCM Education focused on precision medicine in severe asthma. You can take a look at these activities here and here.
• We've been doing a bunch of work focused on aesthetic dermatology for a pharma client of ours, including some Sermo posts and other marketing material. Probably the most interesting piece focused on marketing tips for millennials - basically, how millennial patients expect a different experience from their healthcare provider than previous generations. There is some really interesting data out there. You can access the piece by going to this link and providing your email address.