Workshop: The future of medical meetings and the role of event technology

19 professionals from the world of medcomms and event management gathered together in Manchester last month, to enjoy a morning with the Crystal Interactive team to discuss the future of event technology in the changing medical meetings landscape.

Over the last few years we’ve seen great change in medical meetings, with changes to the funding model for congresses, tightening control over how pharma companies and healthcare professionals interact and the rise of a new generation of HCPs with different preferences for how they interact with the healthcare industry both digitally, and face-to-face.

Alongside this, meeting owners are faced with finding new ways to enhance the customer experience through effective and engaging use of event technology.  Our collaborative session aimed to get to grips with the current best practices employed today, how medcomms can harness the power of their audiences and take a view on the future of event technology in medical meetings.

Attendees heard from three highly experienced panel members: Mark Butcher, Director and Co-founder of APS, Eugene Pozniak, Managing Director of Siyemi Learning and Marsha Caplin, Global Head, Multi-Channel, Envision Pharma Group, as well as Crystal’s healthcare meetings expert, Caroline Perriam.

Following the panel debate, attendees came together in small groups to reflect on the content and discuss the future of event technology in more depth.  Using our Collaborate software and a hackathon process, attendees entered their thoughts via our suite of iPads, allowing us to capture, share and prioritise emerging themes from the group discussions. 

The hackathon revealed some fascinating insights into the current and potential future impact of event technology in medical meetings and we were delighted with the level of collaboration between our attendees.  The top themes emerging from the morning were:

• Maximising the experience of meeting attendees: Attendees agreed that using event technology to maximise the HCPs’ event experience through increased personalisation of agendas and content could quickly add value.  They could see personalisation helping in cutting out irrelevant content and allowing attendees to access information in their native language.
• Using the best of new technology to evolve meetings: How new technologies such as artificial intelligence and crowd-sourcing are providing simpler and more intuitive access to information and meeting outputs.
• Maximising networking opportunities through event technology: How event technology can best facilitate networking, connect people and provide incentives to connect.
• Making event technology relevant, secure, easy to use and accessible to all.

If you would like to find out more about how our award-winning event technology and our team of experienced event technology specialists can help realise the full potential of your medical meetings, please email us or call +44 1483 927 900 to explore the right option for your project.