The Right Prescription for HCPs to Attend Medical Meetings

For life sciences companies, attracting Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) to their events is a key to success. When choosing the events to attend, HCPs are looking to stay up to date on the latest trends for their specialties, meet with experts or key opinion leaders, and network with colleagues. At Cvent CONNECT, Ashfield Meetings and Event’s Katie Koziol shared results from its recent global survey of HCPs to better understand their perceptions of medical meetings, while Cvent’s Abby Fogarty discussed how these findings help maximize a Cvent solution.

HCP Expectations

Gather Pre-Event Suggestions

A majority of HCPs want to contribute to the meeting agenda; 39% have never been asked to contribute and only 15% do so currently. Planners can address this need by adding a few questions to the registration form for HCPs to list key challenges and timely topics.

Provide a Seamless Meeting Experience through technology

Three-quarters of HCPs want their meetings to be seamless in terms of registration, travel, accommodations and prompt delivery of post-meeting materials online and in real-time. They want an experience that is simple and contained in a single platform so they can access the agenda, event logistics, submit questions, and provide event feedback.

Deliver ROI for attendance

HCPs want meetings structured for impact. They seek short, impactful sessions; specialized speakers; a variety of information formats; and interactive sessions tailored to their area of interest and learning styles. 77%  of HCPs place a high importance on educational value, up 30%  from a similar survey in 2016.

Use technology to deliver the right information

HCPs want different technology at different stages of the meeting. The registration site is used mostly pre-event, the event app is used mostly during the meeting, and online content is valued more after an event.  Most HCPs want to be able to access meeting materials through a meeting portal website, up 20 percent from responses in the 2016 survey. Katie noted that many of their clients are using technology to capture data on attendees, but not necessarily analyzing this information and then feeding it back to attendees as well as internally to help structure future meetings.

Power of the Cvent Platform

As you look across the Cvent platform, Abby noted that Cvent offers support at each stage of the event lifecycle in an integrated platform, from meetings management and venue sourcing through event marketing, room block and onsite solutions, as well as appointments and post-event insights to meet these HCP expectations.  Specific solutions life sciences organizations should be using include:   OnArrival for badge printing and attendance tracking as well as  Cvent CrowdCompass mobile apps to enabling live polling, Q&As and networking at events. The complete CONNECT session of Leveraging HCP Insights to Maximize the Cvent Solution is available here.