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With the traditional structure of live medical education turned upside down, academic medical centers have had to rethink how training is done and how information is shared.
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June 2021During a panel at the virtual Combined Otolaryngology Spring Meetings (COSM) in April, physicians and meeting directors discussed how they’ve put together virtual events and reimagined meetings as they’ve kept participants distanced, and even put together live training sessions with precautions.
Carl Snyderman, MD, MBA, professor of otolaryngology at the University of Pittsburgh, said that clinical work revved back up at his center after the initial stoppage associated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but educational activities “took a hit.” That has started to improve. His center, he said, has participated in a “profusion of webinars,” which has led to some new benefits. “People are getting together who wouldn’t have otherwise,” he said. Webinars with participants from around the world have allowed widespread involvement. “We can pop in for an hour-long lecture right in the middle of our clinical schedule or between surgeries,” he said.
Technology Issues
There have been hiccups, however. A live surgery demonstration, for which more than 1,000 people signed up internationally, had technical glitches. “We had to sort of have an I.T. person sitting in a closet with all the servers and running a connection between a laptop to make sure that we could get the feed from the OR,” Dr. Snyderman said. And technology constraints can affect meetings: Certain platforms allow only a few hundred people, and meeting software has certain features—such as live discussion—that some organizers liked while others didn’t. “Invariably, new problems come up,” he said. “Your I.T. person is worth their weight in gold.”
Kate Hutcheson, PhD, professor of head and neck surgery at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said her center has developed the Head and Neck Collaborative Webinar Series, consisting of seven 90-minute webinars that run every two months on a variety of topics.
“This is definitely a whole new world,” she said. “It was unfamiliar for us to figure out how to structure this.” But she said it’s been rewarding and well-received by participants.
In live CME meetings, a center’s own faculty was often used to keep costs down, but this was no longer a concern once the classes became virtual, and the quality has improved as a result, said Dr. Hutcheson. “One of the real advantages we found in moving to the virtual platform was the ability to be a little bit less insular at a lower cost,” she said.
Dr. Hutcheson’s center has received in-kind industry support with the use of a technical platform and live tech support, which allows organizers to focus on programming rather than technical issues, she said. When it comes to live virtual events, it’s all about the tech check. “We found that doing it about two days before the live offering is good because everyone, for the most part, has their slides together by then,” Dr. Hutcheson said. “If they need to run a video presentation, they can check it then. A week before the event is too early.”
Participant Response
At the University of California San Francisco, head and neck dissection courses that are run jointly with neighboring institutions were interrupted because of the pandemic. But with careful planning, they were able to organize a live, but smaller, course in January, said Patrick Ha, MD, UCSF’s chief of head and neck surgical oncology.
It was exciting just to see each other’s faces again. And the fact that we were learning at the same time was outstanding. —Patrick Ha, MD
Eighteen residents and 12 faculty members and fellows participated. Partitions were used to split a room in two in order to limit exposure. All participants were vaccinated and were screened per usual recommendations, and no eating was allowed on site. All of the lectures were prepared ahead of time and viewed in advance of the course, which focused mainly on ablation and skull base procedures the first day, and reconstruction on the second. “People stayed until 4 or 5 p.m. each day dissecting just because it was a lot of fun to be able to reveal this anatomy for the junior residents—it’s great to have a first hands-on experience,” Dr. Ha said.
Because it was the first time everyone had gotten together as a group, Dr. Ha said it was “exciting just to see each other’s faces again. And the fact that we were learning at the same time was outstanding.”
Hisham Mehanna, MD, PhD, director of the Institute of Head and Neck Studies and Education at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., described the transition of the British Academic Conference of Otolaryngology (BACO) International meeting from live to virtual. He said that early program planning allowed organizers to focus on the technical transition once the pandemic hit.
The carbon footprint of an in-person meeting is significant. —Ellie Maghami, MD
In the end, meeting organizers put together 180 sessions with more than 300 talks, all pre-recorded, along with almost 600 online posters. Clear instructions were provided to the speakers on how to record their talks. Fees for attendees were also reduced. Attendance at the virtual event was about 1,400, a 30% increase from previous conferences, Dr. Mehanna said. About 45% of the participants said they had never attended the BACO meeting before, and 20% of the participants were international, up from the usual 10%. “We reached a lot more people who had not or could not attend previously,” he said.
In retrospect, said Dr. Mehanna, the decision to go virtual should have been made sooner, and poster presentations were too static. He hopes to add brief video recordings to accompany each one in the future. He also said there were fewer networking opportunities in the virtual platform, “and that’s what people missed the most.”
Ellie Maghami, MD, chief of head and neck surgery at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif., said it’s important to note the huge difference in the effects on the environment of a live meeting compared to a virtual one. She noted that, largely because so many flights are unnecessary, she had read that a virtual meeting had a carbon footprint that’s just 2% of that of a live meeting. “The carbon footprint of an in-person meeting is significant,” she said.
The consensus among the panelists was that many meetings will move to a hybrid format, with live offerings but with an option for virtual attendance. None of them, however, seemed to want live meetings to vanish forever.
“One thing that I think all of us value about attending live meetings,” Dr. Hutcheson said, “is not just the camaraderie and what we learn, but it’s also the pause that it gives us to think and connect to our specialty and medical environment.”
Thomas R. Collins is a freelance medical writer based in Florida.