With over 23 years of experience planning investigator meetings, Miller Tanner Associates has learned a lot about what makes a successful medical meeting for both the host and the attendees. We survey every participant so that we can give our clients specific direction as to what attendees really desire from an investigator meeting. Here are a few ways you can deliver an exceptional meeting to your healthcare professional (HCP) attendees.
What HCPs Really Want from Your Investigator Meeting
1. Sending an advanced meeting notice is a win-win.
Your medical professional attendees are busy daily managing patients and their clinics. Respect their time. Advanced notice of at least 30 days helps them free up their schedule and set aside ample time to attend your meeting. Not only do you make your attendees happy, but you also set your meeting up for success with increased attendance and a great meeting ROI.
2. Make the registration process experience a no-brainer.
Make the registration process experience as smooth as possible. Online registration makes it easy for your attendees to confirm their attendance. It can be a time-saving benefit because the data submitted is typically formatted on the backend to minimize the tracking efforts that paper registration presents.
3. Keep travel to and from extremely convenient.
Planning travel times and conveniently-located event venues that accommodate busy schedules and require the least amount of time spent in airports, shuttles, and traffic are what appeal most to busy medical professional attendees. Keep one-way travel times under 3 hours for a one-day meeting. For longer meetings, keeping your travel times at a minimum will ensure a higher attendance rate.
If your event is virtual, then travel time isn’t an issue – even better. You may be surprised that a virtual event often yields a higher attendance ratio due to the convenience of online options that accommodate HCP’s busy schedules. Virtual medical and investigator meetings have a lot of great advantages given their accessibility and shorter duration.
4. A well-planned focused agenda is key.
Avoid information overload. Instead, create a focused agenda that maximizes your attendees’ training time and minimizes their absence from their medical practices. Go one step further by providing role-specific agendas with training focused on tasks the attendees must perform in the study protocol.
5. They want the opportunity to interact with colleagues.
Make time on the agenda for networking. This can be done by offering breaks throughout the day or organizing specific networking activities. Networking breaks rank high on the list of priorities for medical professionals at every face-to-face event and this can also be conducted at virtual and hybrid events as well. This is valuable time spent interacting with colleagues, discussing patient care and treatments, and reinforcing learning concepts.
6. More interactive, engaging discussions, fewer lectures, with breaks in between.
Want to lose your audience completely? Then “Death by PowerPoint” is the way to go. Want to engage your audience? Then build in more interactive discussions with fewer lectures. And don’t forget the breaks. Attendees need several breaks throughout the event to network, recharge, and process what they’ve learned. And allowing time for stretch breaks, sunshine, and fresh air keeps your audience more engaged and content.
7. They want online training options.
A recent survey of 800 HCPs and 1,800 post-event evaluations revealed having access to [event] content for several months post-event is important to 80 percent of responding HCPs. The advantages cited are “the ability to take in more concurrent sessions than they could in person, and the ability to stop and rewind parts of an online session to better understand the content.”
Also attendees appreciate having access to online training options for sessions that are more general to research (not study specific). Miller Tanner Associates can easily capture your meeting sessions’ content using VALTs our On-Demand Trainer/Learning Management System giving you the ability to repurpose your training while providing a meeting refresher for your attendees.
8. Give them “White Glove” service.
“White Glove” service is what our Miller Tanner Team does best. Your attendees want the assurance that when a situation arises, they can count on a qualified team of planners to address the problem head-on. They also want to know that the details are taken care of – be it meal preferences or lost luggage – so that they can focus on the training at hand.
Advanced planning, along with easy travel and a well-planned agenda with opportunities to network and interact, make investigator meetings a huge success for our participants. Miller Tanner Associates has the expertise to deliver a medical meeting that will exceed your attendees’ expectations. If you need help planning your next investigator meeting, contact the team at MTA.
