Windshield Time Is Study Time: Why Organ Procurement Coordinators Will Like ElevenReader

Disclosure: This post contains an affiliate link. If you sign up for ElevenReader through my link, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only share tools I'd actually tell a coworker about.

If you're an organ procurement coordinator, you already know where your study time goes: it goes to the car. Between donor hospitals. Home at 4 a.m. after an OR that started late. Back out again on a case that came in before you finished your coffee.

Most of us didn't fail to study for the CPTC because we didn't care. We just never had a quiet hour, a desk, and a brain that wasn't fried from a 20-hour case. This post is about one small change that helped: listening to study material instead of only reading it.

The Problem: Your Study Time Is Windshield Time

The average American worker already spends 27.2 minutes each way getting to work, and 9.3% of workers commute an hour or more one way, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey. That's for people driving to one building.

OPCs don't drive to one building. Our "commute" is the hospital in the next county, the transplant center two hours out, and the drive home after recovery. I'm not going to invent a number for how many hours a coordinator spends on the road in a week, because nobody has published a good one. But if you've done this job, you know it's a lot more than an hour a day.

Add nights, call weeks, and the cognitive load of managing a donor, and "sit down and read the study guide" becomes an unrealistic plan. That's not a discipline problem. It's a format problem.

What the Research Says About Listening vs. Reading

A lot of people worry that listening "doesn't count" as studying. The evidence is more reassuring than you'd think.

• In a randomized study published in SAGE Open, adults who listened to nonfiction material, read it, or did both scored essentially the same on comprehension: 30.9, 31.3, and 31.5 out of 48. Retention two weeks later was also equivalent across groups (Rogowsky, Calhoun & Tallal, 2016).
• The same research team found that people's self-described "learning style" (auditory vs. visual) didn't predict who learned better by listening or reading (Rogowsky et al., 2015, Journal of Educational Psychology). Translation: you don't have to be an "auditory learner" for listening to work.

To be honest about the limits: that study used narrative nonfiction, not a dense exam outline, and the authors note harder technical material may behave differently. Listening won't replace practice questions. What it does well is give you repeated exposure to concepts in time you'd otherwise lose, so when you do sit down with questions, the material isn't brand new.

Where ElevenReader Comes In

ElevenReader is the read-aloud app from ElevenLabs, the AI voice company. A few public facts worth knowing:

• It launched in May 2024 as ElevenLabs' first consumer app and reads web pages, PDFs, and documents aloud in natural AI voices (Bloomberg).
• By August 2024 it was available worldwide on iOS and Android, and added OCR so it can read text from images too (ElevenLabs).
• Per ElevenReader's own site, the free plan includes 10 hours of text-to-audio per month, and smart import skips headers, footers, and page numbers so it doesn't read the "page furniture" out loud. Through my affiliate link you can get 3 months free and 15% off (ElevenReader offer).

The part I care about as a coordinator: it doesn't sound like the robotic screen reader from 2010. When you're tired, a flat robot voice is the fastest way to tune out. A natural voice at 1.25x is something you can actually follow on a dark highway.

Why Coordinators in Particular Will Like It

1. It turns your own PDFs into audio. Study guides, policy summaries, your OPO's protocols you're allowed to use, journal articles. Upload and press play.
2. It fits fragmented time. Ten minutes to the hospital, 40 minutes home. Audio picks up where you left off.
3. It works when your eyes are done. After a long case, reading a page three times and retaining nothing is common. Listening uses a different kind of effort.
4. It's low-commitment. The free tier is enough to test whether it works for you before paying anything — and the affiliate offer above stacks 3 months free with 15% off when you're ready.

How I'd Use It for CPTC Prep

• Listen first, question second. Listen to a section on the drive, then do a handful of practice questions on that same domain when you're home. Hearing it first makes the questions feel less foreign.
• Loop the heavy domains. Donor management and allocation/recovery carry a lot of weight on the exam. Those are worth hearing more than once.
• Keep it hands-free. Set up your file and press play before you pull out. Don't fiddle with your phone while driving. No study session is worth that.
• Don't skip active recall. Audio is exposure. Practice questions are where you find out what you actually know.

If you're looking for something to listen to, my study materials on the study resources page are written in plain language and organized by case flow, which happens to make them easy to follow by ear.

The Bottom Line

You're not going to find two free hours at a desk every night in this job. But you probably already have hours in the car every week. If you want to try turning that windshield time into study time, you can get 3 months free and 15% off ElevenReader here (affiliate link).

I'd love to hear how other coordinators study on the road. What's worked for you?

Brooke Wallace, BSN, RN, CCRN
Founder, CPTCexam.com
BrookeWallaceRN@gmail.com

Affiliate disclosure: I may earn a commission if you sign up for ElevenReader through links in this post. CPTCexam.com is an independent educational resource and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the American Board for Transplant Certification (ABTC), ElevenLabs, or any OPO.