The CME Writer’s Guide to a Better SME Interview
Article Summary: An SME interview helps CME writers uncover the reasoning behind an educational activity: what learners miss, why the gap persists, which clinical decisions are difficult, and what evidence or uncertainty should shape the content. Strong interviews are prepared around the project’s educational purpose, guided by questions that surface judgment, and followed by synthesis that turns expert input into defensible CME decisions.
You finally get 20 minutes with a subject matter expert (SME). The faculty member shows up on Zoom, you have a pleasant and intelligent conversation, they are generous with their time, and you come away with pages of notes. Then you sit down to write and realize you still can't answer the one question that actually matters: what is this education supposed to help learners do differently?
This isn’t an unusual experience. Most of us have walked away from a perfectly decent interview that didn't move the work forward, and the reason is almost always the same. We treated the conversation as a chance to gather information about a clinical topic, when the job was to get clear on an educational problem. Those are not the same things, and the gap between them is where a lot of CME content quietly goes soft.
So I want to reframe the SME interview from the start. It is not a content-gathering errand. It's an opportunity to dig into the rationale for the education content.
The Real Purpose of an SME Interview in CME
At its simplest, an SME interview is a structured conversation with a subject matter expert — a clinician, a clinician-researcher, a policymaker, a client, or an internal expert — guided toward a particular outcome. In this scenario, one person asks prepared, purposeful questions and another answers them. The key word is purposeful. This is not a chat.
In CME, that purpose is easy to mistake. It is not to collect quotes, and it is not to outsource your thinking to someone with (maybe) more letters after their name. The purpose is to clarify the educational reasoning behind the project: what learners are getting wrong, why the gap has stuck around, which clinical decisions are genuinely hard, and where the evidence runs out and clinical judgment takes over.
I come to interviewing from training as a qualitative researcher, and the idea I always return to is going beyond the text. We can all read the papers. We can all read a guideline and figure out what the key clinical information is. But a good teacher takes you past the text and into the teachable moments — the friction points, the pitfalls, the places where a phase III result has to become an actual decision about an actual patient. That is the gold, and you only are more likely to find it in conversation with experts.
It helps to remember that an interview is also a lopsided conversation. You are driving this conversation. You have a limited window, and you need to come out of it with what you need. So you are mostly after the why and the how, because the what is already sitting in the literature waiting for you.
Decide What You Need Before You Ask Questions
Before you write a single question, ask yourself one: what decision will this interview help me make?
The honest answer changes depending on where you are in the education planning cycle:
For a needs assessment, the goal is usually to understand why a documented gap persists, not just to confirm that it exists.
For content development, the goal is to identify the clinical decision points learners actually need help working through.
For a faculty interview, the goal is often to uncover what learners routinely misunderstand — the recurring mistakes a seasoned clinician sees again and again.
For outcomes work, the goal is to clarify what change would be meaningful and realistic to assess.
Once you know the decision, sort your preparation into three buckets:
What I already know — and can therefore skip past.
What I need to test — assumptions, hunches, or things the literature implies but doesn't confirm.
What I need the SME to explain — the parts only a practitioner can give you.
This is also where the dread tends to creep in: I don't know this topic well. I don't know this person, and I've heard they can be difficult. The cure is to start with what you already have and build out from there in small steps. Begin with the materials your client can give you — the needs assessment, the outline, the prior outcomes report. Do the reading. Then research the SME the way you'd research anyone before a conversation that matters: read their publications, get a sense of their positions, and hunt down any interviews they've already done. If they've talked about your topic in the medical or trade press, they've already verbalized the issues for you, and you can build questions from there.
Not sure whether your prep holds up before your next SME interview? Take the 2-minute Readiness Index and see where you're leaving insights on the table.
Ask Questions That Move From Information to Insight
A broad question like "What should we cover?" hands the steering wheel back to the SME and tends to produce a syllabus, not insight. They’ll just reiterate standard responses they’ve shared elsewhere. The questions that earn their place are the ones that surface judgment, learner behavior, and educational priorities. A few that consistently do real work:
The gap. Where do clinicians tend to get stuck? What does the evidence show? What do you actually see in practice?
Clinical judgment. What's the hardest decision to make in this space? Where do the guidelines leave room for interpretation?
Learner behavior. What do less experienced clinicians commonly miss? What would you want them to notice sooner?
Teaching moments. If you had one case to teach this concept, what would it include? Where would you pause and ask learners to decide for themselves?
Prioritization. What is essential for this audience, and what is interesting but not necessary?
A few pressure-tested principles hold the whole thing together.
Open-ended questions are your friend — they invite a story rather than a yes or no.
Sequence your guide deliberately: move from general to particular, and from serious to sensitive.
Open with a strong but easy-to-answer question that establishes rapport and signals that you know what you're about, then work toward the harder material.
With a 15- to 20-minute window, you are realistically getting through four or five questions, so be ruthless about which ones make the cut.
One more move worth keeping in your back pocket: the difference between direct and indirect questions. Ask a clinician what they do, and you'll often get best practice — they want to present themselves as someone who delivers quality care, and fair enough. Ask instead what they see in their colleagues or in their own practice, and the real picture tends to emerge.
💡For instance, in the context of immunotherapy, we know that comprehensive testing at diagnosis doesn't happen for every patient, every time. So you ask sideways instead: What are you seeing across your colleagues' practices? Where does testing fall down between diagnosis and the treatment decision? This is how you’re more likely to get substantive information about tissue that's insufficient for the full panel, turnaround times that push a clinician to start treatment before results land, or the pressure to act on a stage IV diagnosis that doesn't wait politely for a molecular report. The indirect question lets the SME tell you why without having to expose themselves. It surfaces the gap without putting anyone on the defensive.
Let the SME Expound Without Losing Control
You are working with people who often have, let's say, robustly formed egos. They were hired because the expertise lives with them, so let them be the expert. Your skill here is staying in control of the conversation while giving faculty room to talk.
That means tolerating tangents. Your instinct might be to yank things back the moment the SME drifts, but oftentimes the tangents are exactly where unexpected insight hides. Give them latitude, stay patient, and wait for a natural opening to steer back to what you need.
Silence is part of your toolkit here too. When you resist the urge to fill a pause, you'll be surprised how often the SME fills it for you — usually with the thing you most wanted to hear.
And before you stop recording, ask one more question: "Is there anything else you think I should know?" It costs you ten seconds, and it's remarkable how often the most useful thing in the whole conversation arrives at that moment — once the formal questions are done and the SME relaxes into telling you what they actually wanted to say. (Researchers know this as doorknob phenomenon.)
Follow Up When You Don't Understand
You do not need to pretend to understand every term and every assumption. When something trips you up, say so. "Could you say more about X?" is a perfectly respectable question, and it does two things at once. It opens the SME up, because most people, when they realize you don't follow, will work to break it down for you. And it flags a likely teaching moment, because the thing that confused you is may also be the thing learners will trip over too.
It's worth saying plainly, because the fear of looking foolish is real and almost universal: it is okay to not know. Reaching the limit of your understanding and naming it out loud is one of the most valuable interviewing instruments you have.
Adapt the SME Interview to the Project Context
There is no single interview template, because interviews shift with the project and the person. A needs-assessment conversation is exploratory, since you're probing why a gap persists. A content-development interview can lean on an existing outline, walking the SME through decision points. An outcomes interview is often with learners rather than faculty.
The type of expert matters too. A clinician gives you the view from the bedside; a clinician-researcher has a foot in each camp and will frame things differently. They are closer to the data and more alert to where the science is still moving. A policymaker is thinking at the level of guidelines and consensus. Knowing who you're talking to should change the questions you bring and help you match your questions to their vantage point.
And the format sets constraints too. Most SME interviews happen by phone or Zoom; some, especially in news and feature work, happen by email, which is the easiest to run but flattens the back-and-forth that makes a live conversation valuable. Whatever the channel, open with a short framing — who your client is, why you're doing this, and what you're hoping to cover. I put this paragraph at the top of every interview guide to keep me focused on the topic and purpose.
Turn Expert Input Into Educational Judgment
Here's the part that's easy to forget under deadline: the transcript is not the deliverable. Your value isn't that you captured what the expert said. Transcription software can do that. Your value is what you do with it afterward.
(That said, I do recommend recording via Zoom, otter.ai or other products. The SME or research conversations that left me feeling I’d been the best interviewer I could be, or that have generated zinger insights, have often been the ones I forgot to record!).
Synthesis is where you earn your Brownie points. As soon as you can after the interview, go back through the recording and your notes and distill: the genuine gaps, the decision points, the quotable moments, the places where the SME's view sharpened or contradicted the literature. Then translate that material into educational judgment. If an indirect question revealed that clinicians aren't doing the recommended testing, the work isn't to report that — it's to ask why, drill into the reason, and shape content that closes the gap. That chain, from expert input to a defensible decision about what the education should do, is the whole point. The reason we care about the gap in the first place is improved care and better patient outcomes; synthesis is how we point the interview back to these.
Turn Every SME Interview Into Educational Insight with WriteCME Pro
An SME interview is where the reasoning behind the education becomes visible, provided you purposefully look for it. When you prepare around the decision you need to make, ask questions that surface judgment rather than just information, give the expert room without losing the thread, and synthesize the answers into educational choices, you stop collecting content and start building the case for the education itself. That's the difference between a nice conversation and an interview that makes the final product clearer, more relevant, and a great deal more useful to the people it's meant to serve.
Reading about interviewing only gets you so far. Inside WriteCME Pro we coach this directly — practicing questions, running live role-play, and working through real SME scenarios so you build the instinct, not just the checklist. Join us today for practical skill-building, hands-on application, and peer-to-peer mentoring opportunities designed to sustain your CME career.
