Dear JournalFeed Subscribers,
I hope you all are doing well. JournalFeed is here to help all physicians and clinicians stay smart. You are smart; otherwise, you wouldn’t be where you are today. But medicine moves fast. We’re here to help you keep up with the literature. We help you stay smart! We do this by curating the most important articles, concisely summarizing them, and conveniently delivering them to you every weekday.
I have so many exciting things to tell you in this email, but I know some may be pressed for time.
Here are the take home points:
For those pressed for time, you can stop reading.
If you have time, here are the details.
First, we are excited to partner with Haney Mallemat and his new CME company, Scimple Education, LLC (pronounced ‘simple’ – sort of ‘science and simple’ mashed up)! Starting January 1, 2024, we will be offering CME credit for JournalFeed. You will be able to obtain an immediate 36 credits for 2023 and an additional 36 credits over the course of 2024, which is more than enough to meet ABEM and most U.S. state requirements. And we are making it frictionless. This will be for ‘Gold Spoon’ members. For those with ‘Silver Spoon’ memberships, you can upgrade on a prorated basis to Gold Spoon at any time and start getting CME as well!
Next, I am bursting at the seams to tell you about a new partnership with Dr. Amal Mattu and colleagues at the University of Maryland. In February 2024, we will release the first ever JournalFeed Top Picks – 17 high-yield video lectures on the top articles from the prior year in ECG, Cardiology, Critical Care, Environmental, Peds, Airway, Neuro/Stroke, Trauma, PE/DVT, Cardiac Arrest, and more! This will be 10 hours of the best of emergency medicine by Amal Mattu and the colleagues he has hand-picked for you! I am pumped! It couldn’t be more in keeping with our mission to help you stay smart than to have the best EM educators on the planet help us put into practice the “can’t miss” articles from the past year. This will be free for Gold Spoon subscribers, with CME credit included. Dr. Mattu’s ECG and Cards lectures will be free for Silver Spoon subscribers. The whole JournalFeed Top Picks video series will be available for purchase for anyone and will be discounted for Silver Spoon members for a period of time after release. More to come!
Also, we are nearing completion of a total website makeover. Soon, we will reveal a completely redesigned JournalFeed site, and I can’t wait for you to see it. I have seen the mockups, and it looks amazing! It’s kind of awesome to see people with skills like this take my clunky looking site and turn it into something truly beautiful and functional. I know you’re going to like it…at least I do :).
All this is very exciting, but we have had some challenges as well. Since JournalFeed went live with a membership-based site, we have faced serious price increases for most of the services we purchase. We are trying very hard to mitigate the impact to our subscribers by providing you with more value than ever – improving our core JF education, adding CME, enlisting best-in-class educators, completing a site redesign, and more things in the works. But we need to increase prices for the membership tiers. This will occur seamlessly in the background. There is no action you need to take. Silver Spoon will be $15/mo (billed as $180 annually) and Gold Spoon will be $25/mo (billed as $300 annually). We will continue to offer a huge discount for residents. The price increase began with new subscribers on 1 Dec 2023, so if you purchased on that date or after, you will not see a change at all. Auto-renewals starting January 1, 2024 will be at the increased rates. If the price increase presents a financial hardship for you, just reach out to us at support@journalfeed.org, and we will help. Please read additional details on this below. We don’t want price to be a barrier, and we want to help if it is. If you are a current subscriber and don’t want your subscription to renew at the higher amount, you can go to your Account -> Subscriptions -> Cancel. Also, we always send an automated reminder email 7 days prior to your subscription auto-renewal date (be sure JournalFeed system emails are not hitting your Spam folder). So, you will have plenty of heads-up if you want to cancel before it auto-renews. I just don’t want anyone to be surprised or upset. It’s not fair to spring this on anyone, so – if the price increase is not OK with you – we want to make sure you have ample time to cancel if that is what you prefer.
And I want to say this from my heart. I mean it when I say – JournalFeed exists to help ALL physicians and clinicians stay smart. Some may have lost jobs. Some physicians practice in countries where compensation for emergency medicine is lower, which makes the price of JournalFeed out of reach. We already work with hundreds of physicians in places around the world to help them get access. Again, if the price increase presents a financial hardship for you, just reach out to us at support@journalfeed.org, and we will help. We can offer a range of options, from keeping the fees flat for another year until your situation improves to working out a reduced-fee or even free access for those in need. Of course, for students and residents, you can get full blog access with a ‘Bronze Spoon’ membership for free. Please don’t let the cost stop you from learning. JournalFeed is a mission first before it is a business. It is our joy to help ALL physicians and clinicians stay smart. Why? Because the lives of our patients are precious. All our patients have inherent worth and inestimable value. And we know that when doctors keep up with the medical literature, they stay smart, and when they practice smart, real human lives are saved. Nothing less is at stake. You work in the ED…you know this is true. What you do improves and saves lives. And we want to help you do it even better! So, never let money be a barrier. I say it again – JournalFeed exists to help ALL physicians and clinicians stay smart. And we mean that. If you’ve emailed in the past for access, and I missed it, I offer my sincere apologies. I get an avalanche of email every day, and I probably just missed it. Please reach out!
Wow, that was kind of long winded! In summary, JournalFeed is pushing the boundaries to help you stay smart, because smart doctors save lives. We are adding CME and more ways to stay smart than ever before. We are upgrading to make the experience even better for you. Everything has gotten more expensive, so we need to change our prices a bit. Again, no action is needed on your part. We hope you’ll stay with us and support the mission!
All my best,
Clay
Clay Smith, MD
Chief Spoon Feeder
JournalFeed.org