Medical meetings have always had high guardrails and strict rules. Compliance standards, not creativity hold sway, and always will. Yet, even as today’s medical meetings have never been more difficult to mount, tomorrow’s meetings have never been better poised for success. This complex landscape was expertly parsed and predicted at a just-concluded Smart Meetings Webinar, “A Vital 2026 Medical Meetings Update.”
Panelists for the session were three veterans in this meetings vertical who brought not only their decades of experience but also a global perspective. Lars Ingelius, a native of Finland who now lives in Barcelona, is part of the BCD Meetings & Events EMEA leadership team; he focuses on strategic meetings management for Life Sciences. Andrew Hoag manages MICE (meetings, incentives, congresses, events) procurement for Biogen. And Andy Donovan, a self-professed “agent of connectivity” is vice president for strategic partnerships for Life Sciences Ontario, a not-for-profit industry association whose mission is to foster a commercially successful life sciences sector in Ontario, Canada, and beyond.
“It’s a business that never sleeps, it never stops changing,” is how Ingelius described the medical meetings world of today. Gone are the days, Hoag said, of “that legacy dinner program, very dry
conversation around the dinner table, with a prefixed meal.”
What hasn’t changed, Hoag continued, are attendees who “love that engagement, the scientific communication. They’re at the cutting edge of science in whatever field they’re in, whether it’s a device or new therapeutics, and what gets them excited is being in the same room with other like-minded people. And we’re the ones who get to enable that.”
No Time to Waste
Every meeting prof knows meetings have to prove their worth, but all our panelists agreed that this value proposition becomes more challenging every year for the health care providers (HCPs) they want to attract.
As Hoag put it: “Every minute that they’re not in their practice, they’re not seeing patients, and there’s all sorts of challenges for them around that, whether those be financial or timing or otherwise. And so, if we’re going to ask someone to come out of their practice for a day or two or more, it really needs to be worth it; it needs to be time well spent. That challenge is only getting harder.”
More Global, More Challenges
Another more recent wrinkle in the medical meetings vertical is the emergence of global meeting hotspots in places such as Dubai and Southeast Asia. “They are without some of the legacy compliance framework we’ve had in other countries and so, as you bring together a broader group of people from more and more countries, the challenges sort of multiply, in terms of what your obligations are for reporting and meal caps, et cetera,” Hoag said. “The elephant in the room there is the cost of food, the cost of room nights, and just how challenging it’s become to meet the budget obligations, while also delivering a compelling meeting.”
“I think we are all quite in a similar situation globally,” Ingelius said. The challenge, he continued, is to adapt to change while at the same time create a meeting design that is both practical and compliant. “That’s quite a difficult combo sometimes to put together.” He sees ever more resistance from HCPs as their practices also become more demanding. “Whatever we are doing, it needs to be spot on. It needs to be very clear and focus on essential topics only.”
Tech to the Rescue?
As in the meetings industry generally, tech solutions, including AI, are the shiny new objects that both dazzle and confound. “The real value of technology,” Donovan declared, “is not in our view always the tool itself. But it’s how well does it fit in the overall journey? Does it really fit for our purpose? We of course look a lot at how it simplifies registrations, supports attendee participation, improves content accessibility and enables better reporting. That’s all really important.”
“What’s exciting me in this space,” Hoag added, “is HCP engagement as an overall sort of omni-channel marketing strategy rather than just treating an individual meeting as a one-off engagement. Increasingly, we’re using things like CRM (customer relationship management) tools and engagement tools at congresses, for example, to string together a series of engagements, maybe a combination of virtual and in-person, which create a timeline of touch points with those attendees, not just over a day or two in a hotel ballroom somewhere but a month-and-a-half prior to being onsite. And then again afterwards, to get them into an ecosystem of the conversation we want to be having long term.”
Read More: AI Is Here. Are Event Teams Ready?
These strategies and tactics are not new, he acknowledged. Tech tools for audience acquisition and customer tracking have been in use in other industry verticals for a long time, yet they are relatively new in the medical space. “We’re just getting to the point now where there’s some very sophisticated tools around this that help us have the conversations and that ongoing relationship with an HCP or KOL (a key opinion leader, a top-tier medical expert) we want to be having. So that in-person meeting that happens to be occurring in that particular city that day is just one touch point of a much broader conversation on an ongoing basis, online and off,” he said.
Another obvious value that AI-enabled tech can bring is simultaneous translation. “Translation, obviously, in Europe is really a big thing. With a different language for nearly every country, it can be quite messy if you don’t get it right, and you miss so much with the engagement
if that’s not spot on from the very beginning,” Ingelius said.
“Where that used to take an entire room full of people and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of technology in order to do simultaneous interpretation, now it can be done on a phone and an earbud in real time without any of that infrastructure,” Hoag added.
All three panelists agreed that technology offers new and often better ways to track response to programming and measure success, yet the old-fashioned ways have not just gone away—nor should they. Donovan noted that he still solicits feedback from volunteer committees set up specially around his events.
“It’s really asking them, ‘What are the key messages you took away from that? What areas can we improve upon? Because we are looking closely at the user experience. We don’t want them to be bored to tears and then walk away. We want to be able to improve upon every event and be able to
report back the value, not just that the sponsors and attendees received, but also the participants on the panels and the overall organization.”
