What I'm Looking Forward to at #ACR16 Save

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” — Benjamin Franklin

The ACR Annual Meeting (#ACR16) is such a huge event that it’s worth your time to spend an hour or two planning your time at the meeting. (I highly suggest Dr. Philip Gardiner’s post: How to make the most of a medical conference….)

I continue to follow my approach to Optimizing Your Meeting Experiences, inspired by Seth Godin’s blog post on conference planning where he suggests going to a conference in search of “engaged conversations.”

At this point, I generally attend sessions that I want to talk to the speaker afterwards, and make note of other sessions that I want to watch later online throughSessionSelect.

Besides this, I suggest scheduling some time every day to exercise during the meeting. Really: put it in your calendar. (Alternatively: schedule a caffeine nap.)

Here’s my tentative #ACR16 session schedule:

• Saturday, November 12:
  • 8am–4pm: ACR Review Course. Always a well selected group of topics relevant to clinicians.
  • 5:30–6:15pm: Opening Lecture: Harnessing the Internet of Healthy Things: How Connected Health Can Advance Rheumatology. Looking forward to hearing Dr. Joseph Kvedar, author of The Internet of Healthy Things.
• Sunday, November 13:
  • 7:30–8:30am: Year in Review. Summary of the best in clinicial and basic science research of the last year. Happy to see Dr. Ingrid Lundberg from the Karolinska Institutet will be giving the clinical portion this year.
  • 9:00–10:00am: Tech Tools for Rheumatologists Version 2.0. This talk by my friend Dr. Suleman Bhana (@DrBhana) is the one talk that I’m most looking forward to at #ACR16.
  • 4:30–6:00pm: Annual Meeting Tweet Up. See details from my prior post.
• Monday, November 14:
  • 9:00–11:00am: I’ll be helping present #RheumJC’s poster #1145: #Rheumjc: Impact of Invited Authors on a Twitter Based Rheumatology Journal Club. Check RheumJC.com on the day of the poster for a downloadable pdf of our poster. Better yet: come say hi to the #RheumJC team.
  • 2:30–4:00pm: Thieves’ Market: Show Me Your Best Cases. Never forget the importance of Learning From the Extremes in Medicine.
• Tuesday, November 15:
  • 9:00–10:00am: The Future of Medicine is in Your Smart Phone. Another friend, Dr. Jonathan Hausmann (@hausmannMD), presenting ways that advances in technology are changing all aspects of medical care and delivery.
  • 2:30–4:00pm: Innovative Solutions to Deliver Care. Two interesting back to back lectures. The first, by Dr. Rafael Grossmann (@ZGJR), part of Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine and the first surgeon to use Google Glass during a live surgery. The second, by my friend, Dr. Irwin Lim (@_connectedcare), discussing his experiences with telerheumatology.

This post originally appeared November 2, 2016 on Dr. Sufka's blog at http://paulsufka.com/im-looking-forward-acr16/.