A group of medical meeting organizers split off from the main Professional Convention Management Association Education Conference, held at Cleveland, Ohio’s Huntington Convention Center on June 11, to learn about the future of medical education at the Cleveland Clinic
PCMA held two sessions for them in the state-of-the-art amphitheater at the InterContinental Hotel, one of three hotels on the Cleveland Clinic campus. Robert Heard, CAE, associate executive director with the American College of Emergency Physicians, described the ever-increasing importance of providing hands-on education. According to a PCMA article about the session, he said, “How would you like to have your doctor perform a procedure on you that he or she hasn’t practiced since they completed their residency program 10 years ago. As associations, we need to up our game and deliver hands-on opportunities to practice the procedures that are on our PowerPoint slides.”
In a PCMA video interview recap, Heard says, “We’re moving to shorter bursts of information. People want to know the pearls.” Medical specialty societies like ACEP are moving away from 60- or 90-minute sessions to 20- or 30-minute sessions and rapid-fire, interactive and experiential ways to present just the key facts learners need to know to improve patient care. And don’t be afraid to repurpose content from live meetings, he says in the video. It won’t cannibalize your live meeting—it actually will increase attendance as people realize all the training opportunities they miss by not attending.
ACEP is among the medical organizations that are making their meetings more interactive.One hands-on offering at the 2018 ACEP Scientific Assembly in October is a series of skills labs that teach everything from how to insert a transvenous pacemaker to using a lo-fi simulator to recognize, assess, and treat pediatric patients with life-threatening illnesses. On a special area of the show floor also will be the innovatED Pitch Event, where 12 companies will make the case for their incubator and early-stage healthcare products to a panel of healthcare and tech professionals.
In the second session, Cleveland Clinic Chief Wellness Officer Michael Roizen, MD, predicted that, in just 12 years, people will be living to the age of 110. The 71-year-old Roizen has been studying longevity for two decades, and speaks and writes widely on how the daily choices people make can affect their quality of life as well as the quantity of their years. If, in fact, more people do reach and exceed the centenarian mark, the need for medical meeting organizers to tackle the topic of the special healthcare needs of the senior population, already swelling thanks to the aging baby boomer demographic, will become even more vital.
