Virtual Events in the Era of COVID-19: Perspectives From a Virtual Interdisciplinary Wound Care Symposium

Alisha Oropallo, MD, discusses the results found when health care professionals were asked to comment and reflect on their experiences of attending a virtual conference.

Read the original study by clicking here. 

Transcript

Alisha Oropallo, I'm a Vascular Surgeon at Northwell Health and Associate Professor of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research at Northwell. In addition I'm also Associate Professor of the Barbara and Donald Zucker Hofstra School of Medicine at Northwell Health.

I have some interesting information to share with you regarding the virtual events in the era of COVID-19, a perspectives of a research trial that we did from a virtual perspective, an interdisciplinary wound care symposium that we conduct every year in New York.

As we all have been affected by the COVID virus, COVID-19 pandemic, it's created a lot of changes in medicine, especially in the world of virtual conferencing. And so what we did is we pulled data from exit polls conducted in our annual wound care symposium in the tri-state area and where we had many different types of interdisciplinary teams attend. And respondents were asked to comment and reflect on their experiences of attending a virtual conference.

Over 60% of the respondents stated that a virtual conference was better or on par with a live event. And we were also surprised to find that most of the respondents that had stated this actually attended our live event in person in the previous years. And over 83% of them said they planned to access conference materials for the 30 days that remained posted after the event. So what this really alluded to is that many of the participants really not only wanted something live virtually but they also wanted access to the materials at their own time and their own leisure.

It was also interesting that more than 50% of the respondents stated that they favored the ability to communicate effectively with colleagues by instant messaging throughout the conference. And over 80% of the respondents also stated that they would like to attend virtual conferences in the future.

So this shift in person to virtual conferences has the potential of making a significant difference in how we manage and think about health care conferences.

I encourage you to click the link and read more about our research. Thank you so much.