Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube—it’s all too much to deal with on a personal level, much less try to figure out how to use all of today’s social media tools to enhance your CME program. You may even be wondering if you should be using them for CME at all. I’m kind of wondering too.

That’s why we tapped two of the CME community’s top experts in social media and CME, Dr. Joseph Kim and our own social media columnist, Brian McGowan, PhD, to clue us in on how docs are using all this social networking technology, and how and when you can use it to improve your activities. Register now for this free webinar on July 21 at 2 pm ET. Here are a few more details:

What Social Media Can Do for CME

How CME providers are using social media to expand and extend the learning experience for healthcare professionals—and for themselves.

Date: Thursday, July 21, 2: PM ET

You’ll learn to:

• Match various adult-learning formats with the appropriate social media technology

• Use social media to improve learning and measure educational outcomes

• Mitigate the potential risks and reap the rewards of using social media to communicate with and educate HCPs

• Find social media resources geared to CME providers, and use them to deepen your own educational experiences

Panelists

Brian S. McGowan, PhD, CCMEP, is an adult education specialist who focuses on medical education and evidence-based educational design. He has dedicated the past 12 years to medical education as a faculty member, mentor, accredited provider, and commercial supporter. In addition to being the social media columnist for Medical Meetings, McGowan is the chairman of the Emerging Technologies Committee for the Alliance for CME. He currently serves as director, Medical Education Group, Oncology, with Pfizer, Inc.

Joseph Kim, MD, MPH, is CEO of education company and publisher Medical Communications Media. Kim currently serves on the board of directors for the National Association of Medical Education Companies. In 2011, he received the Alliance for CME President’s Award because of his participation in the Alliance for CME Social Media Work Group. He has also served on the Alliance for CME Emerging Technologies Committee. Kim is also an active member of the mobile health (mHealth) and social media community and often speaks at national conferences.

We know that humans learn through stories, and that things learned through stories tend to stick. And when you can relate those stories to your everyday experiences, well, you can count on the knowledge to become part of your everyday repertoire.

Which is why I found this editorial on the practice of medicine and Grimm’s fairy tales to be such interesting reading. The archetypes he wrote about are still being played out in the corridors of our hospitals today, as the author points out. If they help healthcare professionals better understand their patients, why not include some classic stories in the way medicine is taught? Just a thought.