Advantages Of Attending Virtual Medical Conferences

Virtual medical conferences have grown immensely in popularity over the past couple of years, with the pandemic having increased the demand for virtual access to the latest medical knowledge and expert-led interactive sessions. Virtual medical conferences are a great alternative when face-to-face medical conferencing isn’t possible, and some benefits are unique to virtual medical events.

While most of humanity misses in-person conferences and their human aspect, virtual medical conferences have proven to be as valuable as traditional medical conferences in many ways. And you can get the most out of a virtual medical conference by taking the right steps to get the most out of the experience.

To do this, however, it is important that you get to know the various benefits and advantages of taking part in virtual medical conferences 2022. This blog addresses burning questions like –

• What should one expect when attending a virtual medical conference?

• What are the various perks of participating?

The benefits of undertaking CME via virtual medical conferences for healthcare professionals cannot be underestimated. Not only are CME credits legally required for healthcare professionals to maintain their license in nearly every state, they are also essential for improving patient outcomes and ensuring healthcare professionals continue to develop their expertise.

Nevertheless, in order to make CME as beneficial as possible, it must be accessible to healthcare professionals. Today, CME is no longer limited to conferences and in-person events. Instead, it can be completed online through the means of virtual conferencing.

The group with the most to gain from online virtual conferences are all healthcare professionals, from doctors, nurses, and physician assistants to medical researchers, students, educators, publishers, and many others. Among the many ways, medical professionals can benefit from participating in virtual medical conferences, some of the most notable include –

Promoting Practical Debate, Discussion, & Deliberation

• • Virtual medical conferences offer healthcare professionals the opportunity to engage in discussions with presenters about the educational material, which can help them better understand it.
  • Most presenters and speakers find it easier to allow audience members to ask questions and be more participative in virtual medical conferences than they do at in-person ones because of the ability –
    • to mute participants who aren’t speaking,
    • to allow participants to share files (if necessary),
    • to coordinate the asking of questions better.

The Sheer Comfort Of Accessing Top Medical Knowledge From The Comfort Of Your Sofa

• One of the biggest advantages of virtual medical conferences is the convenience they provide.
• With virtual conferences, there’s no need to organize a trip, walk away from your practice, or make concrete plans months in advance.
• Virtual medical conferences also allow you to check out recorded videos of the various sessions at any time and go through them at your own pace.
• For instance, you can watch a video at your clinic, continue it on your commute, and complete it at home.
• Additionally, the capacity to rewatch videos as many times as needed to absorb dense content is a great advantage.

Making More Time For Personal Priorities

• • Due to the hectic nature of the healthcare profession, you probably already value the time you spend with family and friends.
  • A virtual medical conference that takes you for a few days might not be the most appealing CME option for you. Luckily, because virtual medical conferences let you take watch recorded sessions when it’s most convenient for you, it’s not that tough to fit into your schedule without interfering with family time.
  • Virtual medical conferences are generally more affordable than in-person conferences.
  • Although most world-class healthcare conferences are held in family-friendly locations to make travel as easy as possible, there are still fees.
  • Transportation and accommodation still need to be arranged, and childcare needs to be arranged if you are not bringing your children with you.
  • That, baggage fees and incidentals along the way can make virtual medical conferences much more affordable and a much better deal, especially when you’re buying an entire collection.

Facilitating The Learning Of Brand New Treatments & Techniques

• • Learning from an online healthcare conference can teach medical professionals new concepts more in-depth than at in-person conferences.
  • Attending virtual conferences helps take healthcare professionals to a more focused state than in-person ones are capable of, which can help inspire new ideas.
  • Virtual conferences help medical professionals learn about the latest healthcare recommendations and approaches more easily and at a quicker pace too.
  • Some of them also have virtual booths available that provide doctors with ideas for changing their routine or adjusting their workflow, which can help encourage new thinking.

The Opportunity To Absorb & Take In More Information

• • One of the benefits of virtual medical conferences that is often overlooked is that you have a much broader selection of subjects to choose from.
  • While in-person events typically have a very broad scope for their primary focus or focus on topics such as hypertension, online healthcare conferences offer sessions in various specialty areas.
  • This gives healthcare professionals the freedom to earn CME credits in their specialty without being locked into a particular date for a specialty conference.

More Opportunities To Meet, Interact, & Form Lasting Connections

• • Networking is more important than ever, and with virtual medical conferences, it can be easier than at a traditional in-person conference.
  • By easier, the meaning intended is that it’s easier to connect and share information with professionals who have the same interests and face the same issues, and most importantly, allowing for longer conversations because of the lack of constraints on time spent online.
  • The best medical conferences online allow you to connect with sponsors, join general round table discussions and engage with other delegates.
  • The amount of networking that you can do at an online conference is all up to you.
  • Attending a virtual medical conference also offers healthcare professionals the opportunity to meet other like-minded healthcare professionals who aren’t just from the same region but from across the globe.

Scope For Gaining Extensive Hands-On Experience

• • Attending an online continuing medical education conference also involves watching live or recorded sessions that show new procedural methods or other demonstrations.
  • These can be informative and provide doctors with the knowledge they need, allowing participants to be able to practice these techniques in person later on to improve their skills.
  • Virtual medical conferences also often have workshops that offer doctors the opportunity to witness the working of new equipment and the implementation of the latest treatment techniques.

Getting Up-To-Speed With Regulatory Developments

• • Physicians can easily look up such developments in regulations online, but the information presented can be confusing and difficult to fully understand.
  • Virtual healthcare conferences include presentations that explain these regulations in more detail and provide information on how these changes could affect physicians and what physicians can do to prepare for them.
  • Physicians also have the opportunity to ask questions about any regulatory information they don’t understand and receive clearer answers in online sessions than they would in in-person ones.

Truly International

• • For most speakers and attendees, access to physical conferences is limited by travel time and budget.
  • Online healthcare conferences necessitate no travel time and no budget for flights and hotels.
  • There are no flights to catch, no travel restrictions, no visa hassles, and no time away from work and families.
  • Coupled with lower ticket prices and the ability to join from anywhere, this results in increased registrations from all over the world.
  • More attendees and more diverse audiences mean a higher level of networking experience.
  • The diversity of speakers can also be far greater in a virtual medical conference.
  • Speakers can join from anywhere, needing only a stable internet connection, and the ability to pre-record means time zone issues are no longer an issue.

More Extensive Scope For Patient Inclusion

• • The shift to more online conferencing or virtual conferencing options provides medical practitioners with new opportunities to increase active patient engagement.
  • Demands for more active inclusion of patients in medical conferences have grown tremendously in recent years, partly because patient organizations have more actively demanded an active role and partly because physicians have begun to realize that they are unaware of what patients experience, value and need, and lastly also because the exclusion of patients is currently seen as condescending.
  • Additionally, active patient participation in conferences should be seen as a crucial element of shared healthcare decision-making, which is now widely recognized as positively affecting treatment outcomes.
  • From a pragmatic perspective of patient organization, the three most important factors affecting patients’ ability to attend virtual conferences are –
    • no fees,
    • convenient scheduling, and
    • simple website navigation.
  • These demands are widely supported by the world’s foremost medical societies and leading advocacy organizations for patients’ inclusion in medical learning and education.
  • If physical events were free for patients, easy to access, and organized at a convenient time for patients, just as virtual medical conferences are, more could actively participate.
  • Additionally, the participation of patient organizations as panelists or presenters means that patients and healthcare professionals could develop a common understanding of patient needs and preferences, as well as the effects of new and upcoming patient treatments.
  • This shared understanding could thus improve shared decision-making.

Incredibly Wallet-Friendly

• • Virtual medical conferences not only save time but also save money.
  • A virtual healthcare conference eliminates all those additional costs, such as hotel accommodations, catering costs, etc., so you are only responsible for the registration fees.
  • With traditional conferences, finding the budget to attend can be a challenge, and often only one person from an organization attends.
  • Virtual conference tickets give any organization the opportunity to bring more of their staff into the event.

A Great Alternative For The Environment-Conscious

• • The environment is unquestionably one of the biggest beneficiaries of the migration to online conferencing.
  • A recent study estimated that the amount of carbon dioxide generated by each researcher during conference trips ranges from 0.5 to two metric tons.
  • Surprisingly, the total carbon footprint of the roughly 7.8 million researchers worldwide who each travel to a single conference a year is equivalent to that of some small nations.
  • In contrast, the organizers of two all-virtual conferences in the US estimated their total carbon emissions to be less than one percent of a traditional fly-in event.

Offer Far More Room For Adaptability

• • Initially, many people were not enthusiastic about the idea of ​​virtual medical conferences.
  • Sitting behind a computer screen all day was not a good sales pitch.
  • But if the last couple of years have taught us anything, it’s that flexibility is paramount.
  • The thought that now your living room can be your conference room brings joy to numerous medical practitioners worldwide who have been at the forefront of the global fight against the pandemic.
  • Virtual medical conferences mean there’s no need for “speaker tracks” that force you to choose between sessions, and attendees often have the option of accessing pre-recorded content.
  • Getting to access pre-recorded sessions at any time of your convenience makes it possible for you to balance your work, studies, and family obligations.
  • Additionally, most virtual medical conferences offer session recordings or allow you to download them after the event, meaning you can fit them into your busy schedule and listen to them at a time that suits you.

Putting All Participants On An Equal Footing

• • The relocation of healthcare conferences online has also made them accessible to a larger and more diverse audience.
  • Travel and extended absences from home have long been problems for people with children or people with disabilities.
  • Similarly, financial and visa restrictions prevent many people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and particular nations from attending international events.
  • Doing away with these barriers associated with travel has instantly made many conferences more inclusive.
  • While the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2019 in Vienna attracted just over 16,200 attendees, the online General Assembly 2020 registered over 26,000 individual users.
  • Since virtual medical conferences (and virtual events in general, as seen from the above statistic) scale much better than their in-person counterparts, accommodating all of these additional attendees was relatively easy.
  • In order to foster social interactions between participants dispersed across continents and time zones, conferences bring new applications into play.
  • Many virtual conferencing platforms event match profiles uploaded by participants and suggest private video conferences to discuss common interests.
  • Such networking apps not only reintroduce the networking opportunities sought by conference attendees, but can even lower the barrier for those participants who can be categorized or categorize themselves as being more introverted, or junior members, to reach the superstars in their specialty area.
  • Healthcare conference organizers also make use of the ability of online platforms to randomly divide attendees into groups to encourage more mixing, rather than watching attendees automatically gravitate towards the big names.

Improved Rates & Quality Of Engagement

• • Medical conference moderators are also finding other benefits in the virtual format, which have opened up new possibilities in panel discussions and Q&A sessions.
  • At a recent virtual healthcare conference, attendees were invited to vote in real-time on questions submitted through a chat channel.
  • This resulted in better question quality and far greater engagement, i.e., the inflow of questions and quality ones at that.
  • Apart from improving wording and delivering more insightful questions, it also attracted a wider audience to actively participate throughout the discussion sessions.
  • Virtual conferencing also facilitate panel discussions that can be better controlled.
  • Messaging between moderators on a separate channel helps sharpen discussions in real-time.
  • For instance, if there were a panelist who the conference organizers thought was contributing a bit too much, by means of a “behind-the-scenes conversation,” the moderators can jointly decide to choose (or come up with) those questions that are more likely to engage and bring out the expert in those panelists who are less vocal.

Getting To Relish The Combination Of Both In-Person & Virtual Medical Conferencing

• • In-person and virtual medical conferences can never be interchangeable.
  • However, the two formats need not necessarily be mutually exclusive, and more medical conferences that aim to capture the key strengths of both are beginning to be organized as dual events – offering participants the opportunity to attend events both online and in person.

Scope For Great Engagement

• • With virtual medical events, participants no longer need to be in a huge conference room with hundreds of people.
  • Now they can motivate, learn and exchange knowledge via chat and online Q&A sessions.
  • Using live texting, audio, and video chat, participants can motivate, learn and exchange knowledge with industry experts and gain detailed, personalized insights.
  • Now that you’ve gained a fair understanding of some of the benefits of participating in virtual medical conferences, you might be feeling like registering for the first online healthcare event that you come across and participating in it.
  • It is recommended that you don’t hurry into participating.
  • Why? Simply because there are numerous phony medical conferences out there being organized by fradulent organizers with no relevant experience whatsoever, whose sole intention is to defraud hardworking medical students, educators, practitioners, and researchers of their money.

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