Continuing medical education (CME) is constantly evolving as the industry responds to changing healthcare needs and technological innovation. With over 25 years of experience in the CME industry and a career spent directly creating CME activities, Annette Wiggins brings deep insight into the evolving landscape of healthcare education.
Following her attendance at the Alliance Industry Summit in Philadelphia, we sat down to discuss her career path, the pressing challenges facing CME today and how the industry is changing to meet the needs of physicians and healthcare systems.
Q. How did you first get into CME?
I was actually pre-med in school, but I felt a bit discouraged by how competitive everything was. While I was a student, I took a job editing papers for graduate students in scientific and medical fields who didn’t have English as a first language. For them, getting published was everything, and I found that I absolutely loved helping them express their ideas and translate that information in ways they could be published.
Once I had that experience, I just kept building on it. Looking back, it’s interesting because at a recent Alliance meeting, I sat at a table with other CME professionals, and we all laughed about the fact that nobody actually sets out to be a “CME person” when they grow up. We were all coming from different places, whether studying statistics, working in publishing or lab work, but we all fell into this space because something about it captured our imagination and our human need for information and curiosity..
Physicians today simply don’t have the luxury of sitting down and reading through every journal they receive. They’re stretched too thin. So CME helps them stay current and access information they can actually use quickly when they need it, especially since things change so rapidly in healthcare. That’s deeply satisfying work.
Q. How has the landscape of CME in the US changed throughout your career?
The current landscape has changed significantly, and one of the major undercurrents at the recent Alliance Industry Summit was concern over the growing mistrust in medicine, science and public health standards in the US. There’s a pervasive sense of skepticism; the idea that maybe we’re overmedicated and over-vaccinated. The misinformation and distrust has taken hold frighteningly fast, and it has real consequences.
This is precisely why CME is so critical right now. We still have an opportunity to remind physicians that we’ve reached where we are today with critical diseases because of science and research.
There’s also been a troubling shift away from health equity initiatives. For the past four or five years, CME has had a strong focus on addressing health disparities, women’s health, and underserved populations. Now, industry in the US is becoming very cautious about supporting these efforts because they worry about litigation risk. It’s a challenging situation, but I think everyone feels we can’t let ourselves move backward on this front. We talk a lot in CME about wanting to “move the needle,” but we never want to move it backward.
Q. What makes a CME activity truly effective?
The key is understanding where the need actually exists, so where physicians are experiencing a gap in knowledge or access to information at the point of care. We’re focused on designing for accessibility, and that’s why we advocate for short-format education. It’s not about dumbing things down; it’s about making information truly usable in the limited time physicians have available for continued learning.
Physicians need access to either new information or something they can actually implement in their practice when they’re caring for patients. That’s what we prioritize, with the goal of making information more useful and accessible for the audience that needs it most.
Q. What excites you about the future of CME?
I’m really excited about bridging the gap between excellent CME education and actually operationalizing change in how physicians treat patients. Right now, we might teach physicians about a great new treatment algorithm or best practice, but when they return to their clinic, none of it has been integrated into their electronic medical record systems or workflows. It’s like giving someone a bowl of soup with no spoon – full of nutrition but impossible to consume.
What I’d love to see is CME working with healthcare systems to provide tools that can be directly adopted by electronic medical records. We could integrate order sets, treatment algorithms, and practice aids that can be readily adapted for use across institutions.
The real impact won’t just be at the individual physician level, it will be when we help change entire systems so that everyone benefits from this knowledge. I think that’s the next frontier of CME, and it’s genuinely exciting to think about.
Q. What did you take away from the recent Alliance meeting?
Several presentations really stood out. First, there were talks on using AI as a strategic collaborator in education design—for identifying actionable gaps, understanding where learning barriers exist, and defining audiences. One quote that kept circulating really resonated: “AI won’t replace you, but the person using AI will.” That’s both exciting and a bit scary.
Second, we heard from industry supporters about using AI to manage their grant review processes. The fascinating part? AI is literally working while they sleep, evaluating proposals overnight and delivering insights the next morning. Whether we’re skeptical about AI or not, it’s evaluating our work, so we need to understand and harness it to our advantage.
Third, there were great presentations on how CME can impact electronic health record systems and drive systems-level change, which is exactly what I was describing about the future.
Q. What’s your advice for the CME community moving forward?
We need to remember how far we’ve come. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years, and I remember when colleagues were skeptical of using the internet for research. They wanted to go to libraries and take notes the old-fashioned way. But we’ve evolved, and we can’t go backward.
We’re in a critical moment where misinformation is spreading, health equity work faces pushback and systems change takes years. But this is precisely when CME matters most. We need to stay focused on our mission: providing independent, fair, balanced information that helps healthcare professionals do their best work for their patients. That’s what will keep us moving the needle in the right direction.
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