Paperless meeting

Imaglide sent this article to me yesterday because he loves stories like this without even realizing that my boss was at this meeting!

I've never been to a big medical meeting like this, but I have been to a lot of clinical trial meetings. You are getting bombarded with information, and generally are given a lot of hand outs, even whole binders sometimes. Having to take a giant binder home with you on the plane can be a big pain. At conferences like this there will be posters for papers and research studies, there will be presentations, and there will be tons of vendors handing out their cards and information on their company or product. That adds up to a LOT of paper.

The integra foundation granted the organizers of the AANS (American Association of Neurogical Surgeons) the funds to provide each attendee of the meeting with an apple Itouch, making this the first paperless meeting in the organizations 76 year history. It was in the interest of going green, but also in the interest in introducing new technology to physicians. My boss pointed out that the entry fee for the meeting had gone up as well, probably to eat some of the cost.

I got to check out the itouch they were given, it was loaded with contact information for all of the attendees of the meeting. This is useful because collaboration is important in medical research, and it is impossible to meet everyone you want to at a giant meeting like this. Every scientific poster that was presented at the meeting was loaded on the itouch, as well as all of the meeting notes. There was an app so they could run polls during the presentations. It was really slick and well organized, the whole front page was apps made especially for the meeting. My boss liked that all of that is still on the device so it can be referred to later. There is more information, and a demo on the app at the AANS website. Also I checked, the app is available for free in the app store, this could be good for people who wished to attend the conference but couldn't.

Just from my immediate experience it has people excited about using this new technology. Since I have an Iphone already, there is already talk about how we can use these devices in our day to day work. Especially for screening research subjects when we are out of the office. Through VPN a physician or a research coordinator who gets a page in the middle of the night about a patient can review their images and vitals right from the palm of their hand. In another example of new technology being introduced to our workplace, one of the coordinating centers for one of our studies sent up USB headsets. We had been using GoToMeeting for monthly webinars, but we'd have to dial in on the phone. Now we will using VOIP for the meeting, which will integrate into GoToMeeting a lot better.

A lot of people might seem like they are very closed off to using new technology, but if you give them a chance like this I think it's exactly what the doctor ordered.