As the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (Alliance) marks its 50th year, the organization is doing more than looking back; it is using its history to inform where we go next as a healthcare CPD community. One of the most visible expressions of this milestone will unfold on the Almanac over the next year: a monthly series revisiting the Alliance Healthcare CPD Areas of Knowledge through the lens of our own published history in the Almanac Archive from 1995–2017. The newly designed archive makes searching for historical articles easier and can be filtered by each of the Healthcare CPD Areas of Knowledge. Be sure to check it out!

As a peer-reviewed, online publication, the Almanac “informs members about the latest ideas and innovations available to healthcare CPD professionals,” offering insights and applications tailored to our community. In many ways, it is the living record of how our profession has evolved, capturing inflection points, emerging trends and the day-to-day realities of designing, delivering and improving education that ultimately serves patients.

A Year-Long Focus on the Healthcare CPD Areas of Knowledge

To honor the Alliance’s 50th anniversary, each month, an Almanac Editorial Board member will highlight one competency area and draw on Almanac content from 1995–2017 to illuminate how that domain has developed over time.

Editors will put their own twist on the featured competency with the common thread of deliberate reflection: What did we believe then? What did we get right? What have we revised or outgrown? And what still holds true as we prepare for the next 50 years?

Why 1995–2015 Matters

The selected archive window, 1995–2017, spans an era of profound change in healthcare education and in the Alliance itself. During these two decades, our community navigated:

• Increasing emphasis on outcomes, quality and performance improvement
• The rise of interprofessional education and team-based care
• A shift from one-time activities to longitudinal, practice-integrated learning
• Rapid advances in technology — from print and mailers to LMS-enabled, online and blended formats, as well as the rise of mobile devices
• Evolving expectations from accreditors, regulators and industry supporters

By revisiting Almanac articles and features from this period, we can see how these forces were understood in real time and how members experimented, stumbled, adapted and ultimately codified new approaches that now feel “standard.” This historical perspective is especially valuable for newer professionals who may know the current frameworks but have not seen how they were built.

The Almanac’s Role in the Alliance Ecosystem

Within the broader Alliance ecosystem of annual conferences, CPD Cornerstone modules, CHCP certification, webinars, podcasts and section-based communities (acehp.org), the Almanac plays a distinct role. Written for Healthcare CPD Professionals by Healthcare CPD Professionals, it is a bridge between ideas and implementation that:

• Surfaces innovations that can be tested, scaled or adapted in local contexts.
• Provides a platform for members to share lessons learned, including what did not work as planned.
• Captures the voice of the profession: how CPD professionals talk about their challenges, priorities and aspirations.
• Fosters a community of support and professional development

This anniversary series underscores that role. Readers will be able to track how core concepts, such as measurement rigor, interprofessional collaboration and ethical approaches to grants and industry support, have moved from emerging topics to fundamental expectations of competent practice.

Connecting Past, Present and Future Practice

By aligning the anniversary series with the Healthcare CPD Areas of Knowledge that underpin all Alliance education offerings (acehp.org) ensures the series is not just nostalgic; it is directly tied to the skills and knowledge CPD professionals need today. In each case, the goal is not to learn from the past: to recognize enduring principles, to acknowledge missteps, and to better understand how our profession has continually recalibrated in response to patient needs, clinician realities and system pressures.

An Invitation to Participate

This series is, at its heart, a community project within a member-driven publication. The Editorial Board encourages readers to:

• Engage with the highlighted articles and commentary each month. Join the Alliance online community to discuss articles each month and share your “ah-ha” moments. Links to the discussion page will be at the end of each article.
• Share the article with the larger community via LinkedIn.
• Reflect on how your own practice has been influenced directly or indirectly by the ideas surfaced from 1995–2017.
• Consider submitting new work that builds on, challenges or extends the perspectives raised in the series or more.

As the Alliance approaches its 50th anniversary celebration, including the 2026 Annual Conference in Atlanta where the milestone will be formally launched, (acehp.org) this project is one way we honor the contributions of thousands of members who have written, reviewed, presented and debated through the years. It is also a reminder that our shared knowledge base is not static; it grows each time a CPD professional tests an idea, measures its impact and shares the story.

We invite you to join us month by month as we revisit the Alliance Healthcare CPD Areas of Knowledge, learn from our history and recommit to the mission that has defined the Alliance for five decades: advancing continuing education and professional development that ultimately improves care for the patients and communities we serve.