As a specialist in pain recovery, Michael Sprintz, DO, doesn’t have the capacity for fluff. Sitting through someone’s CME presentation shouldn’t be painful, either.
“At the end of the day, you have to give people something they can value,” the Houston chronic pain and addiction specialist told Texas Medicine. “They can walk out and on Monday, try it with their patients. Otherwise, we’re wasting everyone’s time.”
Dr. Sprintz has recorded several CME courses for the Texas Medical Association in recent years, including a lesson on addiction in chronic pain patients. Like the presentations of most physicians, he leaned on personal expertise to help educate peers. Every topic he covers is one he’s passionate about.
Physicians generally must accumulate 48 hours of continuing education credits every 24 months to maintain their medical license in Texas. Two hours must be focused on ethics, and there are other certain state mandates. While CME requirements may be necessary, they don’t have to be boring.
Presenters, Dr. Sprintz says, need to make the audience’s time count. That’s the key to good CME presentations, multiple physicians told Texas Medicine.
“Give them a couple of pearls they can immediately try with their patients. That’s what’ll get the audience engaged,” said Dr. Sprintz, a member of TMA’s Committee on Behavioral Health.
“Isn’t that the goal of CME?” he added. “To educate our colleagues in a way that creates a change in how they practice for the better.”
The free CME courses offered in TMA’s Education Center are created by physicians for physicians. Dozens of courses were recorded live at TexMed, the association’s annual conference. Topics may change over time, but when creating content, real, straightforward talk should always trump showmanship. The best CME delivers true value.
“It sounds funny, but giving CME is like sales,” Dr. Sprintz said. “Keep it interesting and engaging. Watch a few TED talks. If you don’t generate an emotional response of some sort, it’s going to be hard to get engagement. That requires speaking from the heart, not just the head, but also offering real-world guidance they can apply clinically. The audience wants to know, ‘What’s in it for me?’ Your CME talk should deliver that.”
Samuel Mathis, MD, gave a presentation at TexMed 2024 about drug-supplement interactions and nutrient depletion in adults. Facing a packed audience, Dr. Mathis followed his prepared framework but, instead of plowing through reams of data, spoke from the heart.
“Doctors are busy and for the most part, physicians already have the base understanding of how things work,” said Dr. Mathis, a Galveston family medicine specialist. “They don’t need me to go into five slides about what an antioxidant is. They don’t need me to reteach them medical school curriculum.
“If I’m doing a supplement lecture, they want to know: what does it do?” he continued. “What is the actual information that I need to be able to incorporate into practice? And that’s what my handouts then provide.”
Whatever you do, Dr. Mathis warns, don’t just stand on the stage and read the slides off the projector. “I know how to read. I need a presenter to connect the dots, and that’s what I try to do in my presentation is connect the dots.”
And artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help develop ideas and strengthen points of emphasis. That’s exactly what Joseph Schneider, MD, did for his presentation about AI at TexMed.
“The way I used to do it, I would put together some ideas, put together an outline, start to create slides around the outline,” said Dr. Schneider, a Dallas pediatric specialist. “Frankly, I still do some of that work. Nowadays, I go to ChatGPT or [Google] Gemini and say, I’m giving a talk on this subject, here’s what I’ve got so far, can you fill in and tell me what I’m missing?”
With his CME presentation, Fredric Santiago, MD, wanted to simplify a complex topic for his colleagues. That subject was Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a universal language and set of rules allowing different medical software systems to share patient health information.
His TexMed presentation was titled “Under the Hood of Your EHR: Is It on FHIR?” He designed the course to help an audience with little to no technical knowledge of FHIR grasp its utility and importance.
“Learning FHIR on your own can be challenging,” the Kingwood internist said. “When I first started my FHIR journey, I quickly discovered that finding reliable, practical information was more difficult than I expected. I spent countless hours searching websites, reading articles, watching videos, and trying to make sense of technical discussions that often assumed knowledge I did not yet have. Much of the information available online was outdated, fragmented, highly technical, oversold, or simply incorrect.”
He found presenting at TexMed to be rewarding, with nearly 20 physicians attending and engaged.
“I could see the focus in their faces,” he said. “They had no problems raising questions and asking me something when they didn’t understand what was going on … there was a lot of back and forth, and at the end, there were a lot of folks standing in line to talk to me … One physician stayed with me while I was unpacking, and we walked out in the hallway and continued our conversation.”
No CME is published cold. All CME created for members undergoes a review process. TMA vets public health and wellness CME modules through the Committee on Physician Health and Wellness, and for others the association relies on other boards, committees, and councils, TMA staff, attorneys, and outside content experts.
Presenters usually leave attendees some take-home materials, a handout in person or downloadable PDF online. In recent years, podcasts are becoming more popular, since busy physicians may not have time during the day but can listen after clinic or on the way home.
Toi Blakley Harris, MD, professor of psychiatry at UTHealth Houston, led the development of a popular CME course on physician retirement at TexMed 2026. That topic hits close to home for many physicians. Data from the American Medical Association shows that 45% of the active physician workforce is 55 or older. She’s also been involved with recording podcasts about physician transitions.
The former chair of the TMA Committee on Physician Health and Wellness notes that “physicians can’t always attend CME sessions in person, and asynchronous learning is accessible and well-received.” The TMA Education Center currently features almost 70 modules with on-demand webinars or podcast components.
Topics arranged by the Committee on Physician Health and Wellness have done well over time. Outside of ethics, physician wellness accounts for the most content in the Education Center, averaging more than 2,000 registrations each year. Courses cover energy management, mental well-being, anger management, addictions, and breathing, among other subjects.
Those topics are typically associated with physician burnout, something everyone wants to avoid. But these so-called “soft” topics are just as important as CME courses on billing, coding, risk management, and technology.
“For me, let’s talk about the stuff that no one wants to talk about, but let’s talk about it in an authentic way,” Dr. Sprintz said. “If someone’s just talking and there’s nothing behind it, no authenticity, no realness to it, no one’s going to be engaged.”
Dr. Sprintz went to medical school during an era, he said, when “you want to raise your hand, but you don’t want to be wrong.” Nobody wants to be the person who asks bad questions. “In live talks, there are people who want to ask a question and those who will come up and ask it privately.”
Either way, most physicians are simply seeking information that helps them become better doctors. That’s what delivering CME to colleagues is all about.
“The talk isn’t about me,” Dr. Sprintz said. “The talk is about helping other people understand something complex or challenging, and breaking it down into manageable bites they can use. That’s when you get real change.”