Hybrid Solutions for Medical Meetings

Ten years ago, face-to-face was the predominate mode for MedPoint Digital (then named MedPoint Communications), a Chicago-area meeting planning company working chiefly in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. "We were doing a lot of planning for companies like Glaxo Smith Kline, Lilly, Pfizer and Astra Zeneca, to name a few," recalls president and CEO Bill Cooney. But in the intervening decade, a number of trends in the biopharmaceutical industry have grown in significance, pushing clients away from some of the traditional events and more toward virtual and hybrid meetings. "We looked at that and thought, that's an exciting area, why don't we run in that direction?" says Cooney.

Today, MedPoint more often than not leaves the face-to-face logistics to others. "About 95 percent of what we do now is virtual and hybrid," notes Cooney, who adds that his company's planning expertise has been channeled through a different medium -- a shift increasingly being replicated across the medical/pharmaceutical industry.

Why Virtual Makes Sense Slashed budgets combined with technological advances have caused many companies to consider adding a virtual component to meetings, across a variety of sectors. For medical meetings in particular, regulatory forces have shone an even more intense spotlight on budget and payment concerns, adding that much more appeal to the approach. Cooney breaks down some of the reasons for the burgeoning interest in virtual solutions in this highly specialized realm.

• Time constraints. "Our audience is primarily physicians, and physicians are really, really busy," Cooney says. "They have to work harder to make the same amount of money, and they have less time to go to meetings."

• Economic shifts. Doctors aren't the only ones who must work more efficiently to make money. "The economics of medicine have changed for pharmaceutical companies as well," notes Cooney. "They're under a lot of pressure to provide more cost-effective products and lower the costs of promotion."

• Evolving regulations. Industry codes such as PhRMA and AdvaMed, along with state and federal legislation, have placed limits or restrictions on spending and reporting. "There's a whole regulatory regime that's pushing back on travel and costs associated with it," Cooney explains, "like entertainment, dining and so on."

• Technology advances. More sophisticated virtual meeting platforms and increased bandwidth have made meeting this way more natural, and in turn more participants have grown comfortable with it. "It's become a lot more popular and mainstream," says Cooney. "You can do a lot more things today than you could 10 years ago, and just in the last two years the explosion of mobile devices is adding even more to that trend."

The Role of Technology Virtual meeting elements can play a variety of roles in the med/pharma world; for some planners, the technology has affected nearly everything they do. "It's not just a meeting anymore," says Joe Lipman, president of Summit Management Services in Cedar Grove, N.J., "it's three meetings. We do face-to-face meetings, face-to-face with an online component and then, because we're recording the audio and video, we're providing an on-demand portion afterward for those who couldn't attend."

The three-pronged approach makes sense for the vast majority of the meetings Summit does, says Lipman, who works with a number of pharmaceutical firms. "Our clients get more bang for their buck," he notes.

As such, about 70 percent of Summit's meetings are hybrid events, with the majority of participants meeting in one location, face-to-face, and additional physicians attending remotely, either individually or in small groups.

While virtual elements are an obvious way to reach people who can't physically attend a meeting, the technology is useful in other, more complex ways. For example, one major challenge for pharmaceutical planners is getting clients one-on-one time with physicians, even when the doctors are able to travel to an event. Such was the dilemma facing Pfizer's team at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting, held over three days last year in Chicago.

"With society members being very busy, only a certain percentage of them can attend," explains Steve Mapes, vice president of creative services for meetings and events company Impact Unlimited, of which Pfizer is a client. "And then even a lesser percentage of those attendees make it to the show floor where the exhibits are." Impact's challenge was clear, he says. "Not only was it about how we could extend the reach of the convention to those present, but how we could extend the reach of the convention beyond the three days."

To accomplish those goals, "We developed a virtual exhibit that has the look and feel of an actual live exhibit," says Mapes. While the idea of a virtual booth itself is becoming more common, one usually sees them at virtual trade shows. Designing a virtual booth for a face-to-face trade show, one which had no "official" virtual trade show floor, was more unique.

An e-mail blast with an embedded link to the online exhibit went out on the last day of the show, leading to immediate cyber traffic as physicians logged on and began requesting information, which was available in a variety of forms. "They could request abstracts," notes Mapes, "a pipeline was available, they could enroll in clinical trials, and there was information about social initiatives and patient programs." Pfizer reps also handed out USB keys at the physical event, which, when inserted into a computer, automatically opened up the virtual exhibit site in a browser. Links were sent out via Pfizer's oncology Twitter account as well, which also helped to drive traffic.

"The exhibit was up for three months, and in the end, the show had 30 percent more contacts than it would have had just from the live presence," Mapes reports. Since then, Pfizer has added a virtual presence at other key, global oncology events.

The 'Hybrid Steak Dinner' "We are doing a lot of virtual speaker programs," says Bill Cooney of MedPoint Digital, "which would essentially be alternatives to dinner meetings." Such meetings traditionally have held an important place in the medical industry, whereby an expert will travel to a location and address a roomful of local doctors about a specific topic, such as treatment with a specific drug.

"Due to pressures of time and perceptions of the interactions within the industry, we've seen a gradual erosion of the productivity of dinner meetings over the last 20 years," Cooney says. Now, with the implementation of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act fast approaching (see "Legislating Transparency in the Med/Pharma World" on page 32), these meetings likely will be placed under even greater pressure.

"Starting in January next year, every time a physician in the United States participates in an activity where there is a 'transfer of value' -- as defined in the Sunshine Act -- it must be reported to the federal government," Cooney explains. By 2013, that information will be publicly accessible on a government website. "So that website will say, for instance, that Dr. Smith got a free $85 dinner from such and such pharmaceutical company from listening to a talk about this drug," says Cooney. While such transparency is unprecedented in scope, it remains to be seen what the public or mainstream media will make of the information.

Virtual speaker programs now represent the single largest category of MedPoint's business. An increasing number of those presentations are unbranded -- meaning they focus on hot clinical topics rather than a specific drug. "They're more credible," says Cooney, "because they're not about your product, they're about topics that doctors really care about. They get the reps quality time with the physicians, but the program itself does not do the selling. It's a professional service." In that sense, says Cooney, making the program virtual can result in better, more focused content.

"For a virtual meeting, the overriding principal is you really have to give physicians what they want if you want their time. You're not buying them a steak dinner anymore," Cooney points out.

That isn't to say that everyone has entirely given up on providing meals. On the contrary, new technology has given rise to what might be called the hybrid steak dinner.

Restaurant chains such as Morton's and Ruth's Chris have equipped many of their meeting rooms with the technology for satellite broadcasts and web conferencing. "We've done four of those programs in the last year," says Vigdis Tonne, vice president/director of meeting and event services for Publicis Medical Education Group in Chicago. "You have a satellite broadcast from a central location that then goes to 80 different restaurant sites across the country. In each of those restaurants you have about 15 doctors coming for lunch or dinner. They come in, they eat, they see maybe a 45-minute satellite broadcast, then they have a discussion in each location, where people are there to answer questions. So it's a virtual broadcast with a twist, because it's still a dinner program."

The programs run generally two or two and a half hours, says Tonne, and Morton's, for example, provides a turnkey solution for the setting. "They have the meeting room, they have all the A/V there," she says. "And because you don't have to have someone run cables and all the food is already there, it lowers the costs tremendously."

Research on the Agenda Hybrid meetings also play an important role in clinical research and "investigator meetings," at which physicians and researchers gather to present and discuss findings. For such events, planners needn't do much to attract attendees, as doctors and investigators are paid to participate, and their presence is mandatory.  

These events can be quite large, with hundreds of people in attendance. There might be anywhere from 50 to 200 international study sites for a trial, with two to four physicians based at each site. "One of the big differences for clinical investigator meetings is that they're global," notes Cooney. "These days, in the majority of cases where a company is developing a new drug, it's a global development program. So we're dealing with big differences in time zones and big distances to travel, and with travel just getting tremendously more expensive, there's great pressure to go virtual."

Often, representatives from several study sites will convene in various locations; groups from several sites in India, for example, might meet in one city in that country, while participants in China also gather in one location concurrently. These events then open up further to include virtual attendees.

"It's very helpful to get researchers together in one room," says Cooney. "They can talk to each other, have good face-to-face interaction, ask questions and have some discussion in their native language."

Then, Cooney continues, the virtual portion of the hybrid meetings will typically happen in English, the intern­ational language of research. "That's where they connect with the far-flung team to present all the sides and study operations. It's virtual but it's interactive -- there are questions back and forth."

In addition to the dramatic savings in travel costs realized with such an approach, clients see a dramatic boost in efficiency, says Rory Pszenitzki, president of Zki Communications and Summit Management's technical director. "In the past, when a pharmaceutical company was confronted with issues of having to communicate crucial information, the people who were at the meeting had to 'carry the water back' and share that information with the people who couldn't attend." That was tremendously inefficient, he adds.

What's more, Pszenitzki says, there's typically a fairly high turnover rate of investigators during extended clinical trials. "In the past, each new participant had to be briefed one-on-one, where an enormous amount of information was repeated for them." Now, he says, with each meeting being recorded and so much information available on demand, it's far easier and more efficient to get participants up to speed.

Because of the global scale, the clinical research applications are some of the most exciting uses of hybrid meeting technology, according to Cooney. "The cost savings, time savings, productivity, carbon savings -- there's so many benefits to doing it this way," he says. "And it helps studies get done faster and at lower cost. Ultimately, it's all about making medicines more affordable."