On April 18th, 53 healthcare professionals from across the Appalachian corridor showed up at UT Medical Center's Wood Auditorium for a full-day workshop on theranostics. That number: 53 people, one Saturday, on a topic that many community providers have never encountered in formal training, tells you something meaningful about where we are in this region and what ARC is trying to do.

We asked everyone to complete pre- and post-workshop assessments so we could measure what actually happened, not just what we hoped happened. The results were, to be blunt, better than I expected, and I'll explain what that means and what we're going to do differently for Workshop 2.

People Stayed

We tracked session completion through continuing education forms with 27 of the 53 attendees submitted CE documentation. Of those 27, 25 completed all three sessions. Two left after the first session. That is a 92.6% retention rate for a full-day program on a complex clinical topic.

To put that in context: typical continuing education workshop retention runs 60 to 75 percent. People have competing priorities. Content doesn't always hold at the right depth for a mixed audience. Things happen. I believe that shows we organized a strong workshop that was able to keep people interested throughout the day.

The attendance-to-registration conversion is also worth noting. 57 people pre-registered; 53 showed up. A 92.9% conversion for a day-long educational event is not something you see often which I think shows that the demand is real.

Did people learn anything?

Pre- and post-workshop assessments measured confidence across five competency domains on a 1-to-5 scale. A score of 1 to 2 means significant knowledge gap. A score of 4 to 5 means ready to implement independently. The question we were asking: where did people start, and where did they end up?

The headline number is imaging interpretation: 2.17 pre-workshop, 4.21 post-workshop. That is a 94% gain in the domain where participants started with the lowest confidence. It is also the domain where hands-on, case-based training provides the highest value. You cannot learn to interpret PSMA PET findings from a slide deck. You learn it by working through actual cases with faculty who have done it hundreds of times. That is what the workshop provided.

Program implementation and patient identification both improved by more than 60%. Even clinical workflow, which started highest because some attendees had adjacent experience, improved 32 percent. The overall mean moved from 3.06 to 4.49 across all five domains: a 47% gain.

Who was in the room

One of the things I wanted to understand from Workshop 1 was whether we could attract the multidisciplinary audience that community-based theranostics actually requires. You cannot build a program with only technologists, and you cannot build one with only administrators. You need the full stack in the same room.

Nuclear medicine professionals made up 28.3% of the room: 9 technologists and 6 physicists. That is a solid core. Administrators at 13.2% is meaningful because those are the people who make institutional decisions about whether a program gets resourced. The 13.2% research and education contingent is the future workforce.

The number I keep coming back to is 30.2%: the share of attendees with secondary credentials beyond their primary role. Administrators who are also trained technologists. Students with research backgrounds. Physicists with hands-on technologist skills. These are the bridge roles, the people who can translate across institutional silos and actually carry a program forward. We did not plan for that specifically. The cohort self-selected that way, which suggests the people most motivated to attend a workshop like this are also the people most likely to do something with what they learned.

Where Could We Improve?

The physician attendance number is 7.5%. That is too low. ARC's mission depends on two audiences: nuclear medicine professionals who can deliver therapy, and referring providers who can identify and route eligible patients. We reached one of those audiences effectively. We did not reach the other.

I don't think that is a curriculum problem. The content that physicians would need, such as: patient selection criteria, referral pathways, what to tell patients about what to expect was present. I believe the probelm might be recruitment. Oncologists and urologists may not attend nuclear medicine focused workshops, even when the content is directly relevant to their patients. Workshop 2 requires a different outreach strategy: direct engagement with oncology and urology practices along the corridor, probably through the referring provider resources like we have been building on ARC's site.

The other gap is data capture. Only 50.9% of attendees submitted CE forms. That means our retention calculation is based on a sample, not the full room, and we do not have pre/post data on everyone who came. For Workshop 2, perhaps we can come up with a good way to track day-long attendance. Anectodally, many individual were still present even at the waning hours of the meeting which was encouraging.

What this actually means for the corridor

The question we set out to answer with the first workshop was whether structured, hands-on education could meaningfully move the needle on provider confidence and competency in theranostics, and whether there was enough regional demand to make the effort worthwhile. The answer to both is yes.

53 people attended. 92.6% of CE submitters stayed all day. Every single post-workshop respondent reported learning something new. The domain with the weakest baseline improved by 94%. These are not marginal gains. They are the kind of numbers that tell you the model works and the need is real.

The practical implication is this: among the 53 people in that room, 15 are nuclear medicine professionals with hands-on clinical expertise, 7 are administrators with decision-making authority, and 16 have the secondary credentials to bridge across institutional roles. If even a fraction of that cohort goes back to their institutions and starts moving toward an RLT program, the corridor might look different in 12 months than it does today in terms of providing RLT services.

Workshop 2 is coming. It will be different content, planning to have virtual access, and built with physician recruitment in mind. If you are a referring provider in East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, or Southwest Virginia and you should have been in the room on April 18th, now is a good time to get on the list.