Today we launch our long-planned webinar series, “The Hot Seat”. It will be a new and unique venture for me, but I am very excited to get it off the ground. The Hot Seat will be a quarterly webinar presentation where we will have direct and open discussions on important issues facing our industry. My co-host and co-creator in this project is Judge David Langham. Langham is the Chief Deputy Judge for the Florida Office of The Judge of Compensation Claims, and is a prolific blogger whose opinions are widely respected far beyond the borders of our state.

The inaugural episode is entitled “Opioids and Formularies; Going to Pot?”, and will feature Texas Workers’ Compensation Commissioner Ryan Brannan and Prium Senior Vice President Mark Pew. Pew is also known as the “RxProfessor”. We will be assisted by an off-camera moderator, Marty Gworek. It airs live at 1:00PM Eastern. People may register for it here.

If you cannot attend, Our Senior Editor of Premium Media, Dara Barney, will be live tweeting the event from our Twitter account @wcconnections. The program will also be available here for replay shortly after it airs.

We invited Pew and Brannan to be our first guests in this effort for a few reasons. Beyond their obvious knowledge regarding comp and the topic at hand, they both have terrific personalities as well as a great sense of humor that will make for an entertaining hour of information. From both an attendance and technical perspective we didn’t really know what to expect, so if the wheels come completely off the bus I wanted people who could laugh with us (or at us) in the process. 

We are thrilled that hundreds of people have registered for this first program. We are certainly aiming to not disappoint. The platform we are using is quite robust. It includes the ability for attendees to comment in live chat, and submit questions to the panel. We can even bring attendees in (on camera if their computer is so equipped) to ask questions live in the presentation, although I am not sure we will use that feature for this first episode.

Frankly, despite numerous technical trials, I’ll be lucky if I don’t accidentally disconnect everyone. Even though the guests are the ones intended to be on the hot seat, as webinar administrator I will definitely feel as though I am the one in that spot today.

I hope you can join us this afternoon (or this morning for those of you on the left coast). The topic du jour is becoming more critical for our industry by the day, and we do expect this to be a highly informative presentation.

See you on The Hot Seat.