Just as one might bring a tech
meeting to Silicon Valley, a political convention to the
Beltway or a manufacturing association gathering to a Rust Belt
state, a planner placing a medical meeting should consider one of
several U.S. destinations with a rich concentration of medical
companies, facilities and history. Places like Durham, N.C.;
Jacksonville, Fla.; and Rochester, Minn., offer targeted support
for medical and pharmaceutical groups, from expert speakers in the
field to world-class facilities and hotels that are accustomed to
the nuances of serving this important market niche.
Durham, N.C.
This city is headquarters to two
medical heavy hitters. The first, Research Triangle Park (www.rtp.org), was founded
in 1959; it occupies 6,971 acres and is home to 160 companies, 48
of which are in the life sciences sector. The two largest such
employers in RTP are pharmaceutical manufacturer Glaxo-SmithKline
(with 6,400 employees) and Biogen Idec (720 employees), which
develops therapies for the treatment of diseases such as lymphoma
and multiple sclerosis.
Number two is the world-famous Duke
University (www.duke.edu), which has schools of medicine, nursing
and continuing medical education, as well as the Duke Comprehensive
Cancer Institute and the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and
Policy, among others.
According to Reyn Bowman, president and
CEO of the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau, these two
medical giants “have people who are at the very top of their
fields” and thereby give Durham credibility. Indeed, planners often
turn to resident experts as resources, he adds.
But the proof is in the meetings: Since
the start of 2007, Durham has hosted gatherings of the American
Board of Pediatrics, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co. and
the Alzheimer Disease Conference, among many others.
Downtown, the Marriott-managed Durham
Civic Center has a large ballroom (14,080 square feet) and exhibit
hall (18,120 square feet) and is connected to the 189-room Durham
Marriott at the Civic Center. The three campuses of Duke University
surround the Civic Center, which is just four miles from Research
Triangle Park.
Within RTP itself is the 198-room
Radisson Hotel Research Triangle Park, the sole property on the
grounds. RTP does have another great meeting space, however: the NC
Biotech Center’s Hamner Conference Center with 19,000 square feet
of meeting space, including a 170-seat auditorium, a 40-seat
boardroom and a 100-seat banquet room. The center can host 175
people for an outdoor reception in its marble sculpture-dotted
Ciba-Geigy Garden.
For a bit of luxury, 20 minutes away
from RTP is the 271-room Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, which
has hosted medical-minded companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and
Merck. For local groups or those staying elsewhere, the Washington
Duke also has its Executive Conference Center, a member of the
International Association of Conference Centers, which can host
groups of up to 600.
JACKSONVILLE'S TOP 10
Jacksonville, Fla., has more than 30 medical facilities within its sprawling city limits. The 10 most prominent:
> Baptist Health
> Mayo Clinic
> Memorial Hospital
> Naval Hospital Jacksonville
> Nemours Children’s Clinic
> St. Luke’s Hospital
> St. Vincent’s Medical Center
> Shands Jacksonville
> University of Florida Proton Therapy Institute
> Wolfson Children’s Hospital
Rochester, Minn.
In 1883, a tornado razed Rochester,
Minn., prompting the English-born Dr. William Worrall Mayo and his
two sons, Drs. William J. Mayo and Charles H. Mayo, together with
the Sisters of St. Francis Church, to found St. Mary’s Hospital,
the city’s first. This institution would go on to become the
world-
famous Mayo Clinic. Since its founding, the Midwestern city of
Rochester (population 100,000-plus) has become closely intertwined
with the hallowed health facility. Mayo, which employs 31,300
people, takes up a fair bit of acreage, including the campus itself
and the Mayo Civic Center (www.mayociviccenter.com), which offers 125,000
square feet of meeting space plus 25 breakout rooms.
“One-half of the downtown area is the
Mayo Clinic,” says Brad Jones, director of the Rochester Convention
and Visitors Bureau. Medical meetings are drawn here, says Jones,
to be next to the clinic, which can provide keynote speakers and
tours of its facilities, many of which are in historic
buildings.
The Mayo Clinic itself puts on a robust slate
of continuing medical and nursing education classes (CME and CNE,
respectively), which are open to its own clinicians and the medical
public. As a result of these enticements, in 2007, Rochester
welcomed about 50,000 medical meeting attendees.
For now, a large meeting of 3,500 to
4,000 attendees is “about our limit,” says Jones, but that will
change: By 2012, an expansion of the Mayo Civic Center should be
complete, adding 200,000 square feet of space to the existing
structure. Also, an additional 800 hotel rooms should be available
in the downtown area (plus more outside of it) by 2012.
For now, Rochester has 5,000 hotel
rooms. Of those, about 1,700 are in the downtown area and are
connected to the Civic Center and Mayo Clinic by a system of
skyways and climate-controlled pedestrian subways (good for those
Midwestern winters). The largest is the 1921 Kahler Grand Hotel, a
700-room property with 30,000 square feet of event space and an
idiosyncratic pricing structure. At the low end of the scale,
Kahler’s standard rooms will run $60 a night; at the top -- both
literally and figuratively, since the Kahler’s highest floor is a
five-diamond “hotel within a hotel,” the International (www.internationalhotelmn.com) -- prices range from
$600 to $3,000.
For a more consistent room stock, the
Rochester Marriott Mayo Clinic Area offers 193 guest rooms plus 10
suites. Over the past four years the hotel has completed $20
million in renovations and is, according to Jones, Rochester’s
“rate-setter.” The Marriott has 10,021 square feet of meeting
space.
Jacksonville, Fla.
In Florida’s northeast corner,
Jacksonville is, by population (800,000 residents), the Sunshine
State’s largest city. By area -- 840 square miles -- it is the
biggest city in America. It’s also a growing medical hot spot. In
recent years, U.S. News & World Report has thrice
ranked its St. Vincent’s Medical Center as having one of the top 50
cardiac care programs in the country and, in 2007, Baptist Health
as one of the top 50 U.S. hospitals for digestive disorders.
Along with Scottsdale, Ariz.,
Jacksonville is home to one of two Mayo Clinic campuses outside of
Rochester, Minn. It also has America’s fourth-largest naval
hospital and medical companies such as Vistakon (a division of
Johnson & Johnson), Medtronic Xomed and Body-Tel Scientific
(coming soon). The city is linked to several nearby schools that
conduct medical research, including the University of Florida at
Gainesville and Jacksonville University.
To capitalize on these assets, the
convention and visitors bureau, Visit Jacksonville, and the local
government recently launched a medical tourism campaign designed to
brand Jacksonville as “America’s Health Center,” and thus attract
more medical meetings and conventions. (Over the past five years,
Jacksonville has hosted approximately 10,200 room nights’ worth of
medical meetings and events.)
The initiative has a web presence at www.visitjacksonville.com/medical. Lyndsay Rossman,
Visit Jacksonville’s director of corporate communications, says the
city “offers a medical meeting or convention experts skilled in the
medical arena to speak or conduct business-to-business activity
with attendees.”
Jacksonville’s Prime F. Osborn III
Convention Center (www.jaxevents.com) pro-vides 265,000 square feet of
space and 78,500 square feet of exhibit space in an atmospheric
former railroad station. On either side of the St. Johns River,
which divides the city, the most popular hotels for medical
gatherings are the 966-room Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront
and the 292-room Crowne Plaza Jacksonville Riverfront. The 354-room
Omni Jacksonville Hotel and the 324-room Wyndham Jacksonville
Riverwalk also draw their share of meetings in the medical
niche.