Virtual Meeting Review - EULAR 2020 - Drs. Kathryn Dao, Rachel Tate And Jack Cush Save

All right. Hi, I'm Jack Cush, we're in A Room Now. I'm here with two great friends, Doctor. Catherine Dow in Dallas, Doctor. Rachel Tate in West Palm Beach.

I'm in Dallas. We're here to discuss the virtual meeting experience. Good evening, ladies.

Hi, Jack. Hi, Jack. Okay,

so I wanna do a little prelude. I know you may know this, but I think before we go into our review of what was ULAR twenty twenty, we should be clear on a few things. Number one, this was not a planned meeting. This was not a planned virtual meeting that eight weeks before ULAAR is going to drop, they find out we can't do the meeting. So for you all to have put together this meeting is actually unbelievable.

And for that, they get four gold stars. I think we're gonna rave about them a little bit here. We're gonna rag on them a little bit here, but I don't wanna be a pick on EULAR thing. I think we just have to talk about the realities of what makes virtual learning better. And so I think that we wanna start out by saying kudos to EULAR and what they did.

Do you both feel that same way or what do you think?

Rachel, you wanna start?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it was a Herculean effort to put all of this together for people from around the world. And I really applaud the effort. It was amazing to be able to access something that I wouldn't have naturally been able to go to. So yeah, I mean, it was a great effort and it was good to see everybody.

I hear that. Yeah. Well, and I also thought that the content was really good. I was shocked because, you know, how sometimes people can run meetings and, the content on virtual online stuff, it can be really boring, not very engaging, but the fact that they were able to pull in like really good speakers, they were able to get abstracts and presenters who were engaging and the media format really did work.

And that's hard to pull together as we do media and streaming for RheumNow Live the last two years and that's hard to get done. But a lot of planning, you can get a lot done. They obviously did their homework. We're gonna in this segment talk about three different approaches to this issue of virtual learning. One, what do you think was great about UR twenty twenty?

Number two, what do think were the weaknesses that we'd like to see improved upon? And lastly, what's your recommendations on future learning and for the ACR and other meetings as they plan for a virtual experience? So let's start with, I'm gonna just sort of go around the horn. Let's give us one at a time. Catherine, what do think was great about the meeting?

I love the fact that I could just roll out of bed and not even have to put on makeup or do anything and just plug in, put on my headphones. Kids could be like still asleep, especially with the time zone difference. I mean, the negative here is yes, I'm exhausted because I did set my alarm clock to the wee hours of the early morning. But in terms of, what I found very effective is the fact that if a speaker, you know, if it's a prerecord session, I could put it on pause. Like if I didn't get something, I could rewind it a little bit.

I could also Google something. I could take a screenshot of it and post it. So, I mean, I can manipulate the media in so many different ways. So I thought that that was, you know, probably one of the best features of it. It's it's a matter of also multitasking because even though I was covering reporting for RheumNow this Euler meeting, I was still seeing patients, Jack.

No guilt there.

No, I know it's not easy to do and I tried it and I didn't do very well at it. And I had to block some of my time so I could do the EULAR. But that's interesting that you try to do that much, but it helped to get up so early and have at least that protective block. Rachel, what's your take on what was great?

I mean, obviously I echo Kat's sentiments. I think it made it easier for me to be able to balance a little bit better being on the East Coast with patient care, which I'd already had planned and then working for RheumNow, but also attending sessions. For me, I think the best part was that I have been on bed rest, So I would not have been able to attend this conference and so having the option to attend for me was by far the greatest gift. Obviously this is an educational panel for us and that's something we've talked about for years together as a threesome and beyond. And so to be able to attend a conference that I would not have been able to attend because of a pregnancy and complications.

This was a big deal to me. And so I wanted to be able to share the fact that we can learn remotely and still take a lot of good content away. That was by far the biggest deal for me.

It's a very level playing field. I mean, I think the experience is different for everyone but what it's a remote streaming experience like this was, it kinda is the same for everybody. And like you say, whether it's a mobility issue, a health issue, whether it's a time issue, this sort of solves all problems by doing it virtually. Pretty interesting. I thought that the versatility part was great, meaning that I saw this very funny tweet, someone had the program up and said, maybe it was you Rachel, I don't know, but someone said, it's no longer a problem to choose between hall A and hall B that are three miles apart.

I can do both of them whenever I want by just a click and a wait and just, so that versatility allowed you to cover a lot more ground, allowed you to really get to everything that you wanted. You didn't have to compromise which one's gonna be better and who knows before you go if it's gonna be better or not. So I think that versatility, ease in which you could choose what you wanna watch was certainly a real strength. Any other strengths, Kat?

So I really enjoyed the fact that you're able to ask your questions of the speakers in the live sessions. I mean, it's a plus and minus because, you know, the minus is if it was a prerecorded presentation, there's no way you can access the speaker. You know, like if you were to type in, I mean, it's not like a bunch of people at once. You can actually read the questions and then listen to the answers too. So I did really enjoy that.

I mean, think

But before you do that, the Q and A failed in many sessions. And I think it was it your experience that you had to be in the live session to actually see the Q and A actually at work? Yes. So that was really the issue. But there are a lot of other sessions that were, if you're looking at the recording and there was no Q and A even included in the recording.

So that might've been a fault of some of the, how it was posted after the fact. So interesting that you had to be in the live session to be a part of that Q and A.

Right. Yeah, it's because they have to, I mean, they only have the professors there for a certain period of time. So obviously, you know, they would need to be able to only access the Q and A at that time. So, I mean, in terms of what I think is going to happen is that they have to incorporate the teleconferences with the live sessions and how they're gonna do that with the ACR is gonna be interesting and whether or not ACR is gonna be held live. I just think that, you know,

What do you mean incorporate teleconferences with live sessions?

Oh, yeah. So, you know, you can't attend everything, right? Just like what Rachel was saying, hall A, hall B and being able to attend both. So with ACR, there are times when, you know, some of the live presentations can conflict. And then there are times when you got a huge gap that you're not sure what to do with, with your time in the poster hall.

You just don't want to walk around. You're tired. So if we can just pull up one of the prerecorded presentations, like after they had already presented and watch it during that time, I think that that's great. I think that's good, would be effective. I mean, you ran RheumNow as a virtual, you know, half virtual, half live conference.

I think that's probably one of the most innovative ideas I've seen. I mean, what do you think that you, LAR did differently, from your RheumNow conference and how would you incorporate that in RheumNow?

Was a different first off, ours was planned as a live streaming event that could also be recorded and viewed on demand later. Ours was planned to meet the needs of the learner. We actually did all of our presentations so that our presentation of them was learner focused. I think one of the challenges that you are to deal with and could not have dealt with actually in an efficient way or great way in the short timeframe they had, was they were so locked into getting the logistics down and getting different kinds of speakers and presenters up to snuff. And most people are not electronically adept.

So that the idea, all the focus was on trying to coach the speakers to get it done right. But in the end, what they might've missed was presentations that were learner focused, right? And how they deliver things. When you do that, I think then you will have gone the next step in virtual learning. And that's, I can't say that RheumNow has always done that, always right or well, but that is certainly been our focus in our planning, the two meetings that we've done.

Rachel, any other positives on your list?

Well, I was just gonna say not everybody is you in the sense that, and I mean that in a good way, but because the focus has had to shift. I think that's the difference. Obviously, attend any conference and you recognize that there's a distinction between being a panelist, being a speaker and then obviously being part of the community who comes to listen to that. And there's always, you have to break that fourth wall no matter what position you're in. And I do think that the Q and A's worked relatively well during the live sessions, but if I had a patient and I saw a session after the fact or a poster, I wasn't able to interact and engage with it the same way we would if we had the exhibitor, like the hall, the poster hall, you know, and I do think that's, it was a positive that they tried to include it, but for me, it's also kind of shaded by the fact that we have had such great experiences with as you've done, Jack, with RheumNow live and then also what we try to do presenting at other conferences.

But to me, I really I think the connectivity of trying to do something with, again, a Herculean effort, it was an amazing option and I'm so glad they did it. I think we have a lot to learn, all of us, but I am very pleased with how it turned out because I was a little nervous upfront, I think we all were, how is this gonna work? And I really applaud them specifically because they also, the benefit of bringing everyone together is that you're all on the same time zone. So some of the prerecorded really, really interesting speaker topics were just, there was no way to do a Q and A because they're twelve hours in advance. I think and there's a hard line with that too because not everybody could travel.

So I really applaud them. That's my takeaway from that.

So I wanna say that the one real plus that I'll give them is the poster experience. That the idea that you could click on e posters and then see this cavalcade of poster sessions and you could march through them and then in each session march through the abstracts just as if you were going down the aisle saying, no, no, no, oh, I'm interested in that one. And you can go in and you can look at it. So I thought the posters, the way they were laid out, the way they were presented was effective. I think the problem was that often the posters, if you really wanted to view the posters well and a lot of the presentations well, you needed to have the UR abstract page open and then the poster page open so you could read better here or look at something better here.

Because sometimes the e posters or the presentations, you had that magnifier, which was goofy and you had to go to a full page screenshot to see something and that was a little difficult. And then I thought that it would have been great if all the posters and all the presentations had audio clips that were not limited to twelve seconds, but in fact would be substantive presentations by the authors. Language problems or not, that would have certainly helped. So let's get into some of the pitfalls of this. I want to start with, there are actually two surveys, one done by Olga Petrina, one done by Janet Pope, where they both asked, what do you think of you are and how would you like to do this?

And they were both pretty consistent. One said 65%, two thirds said, I really want the live meeting. And in that one, there was 25% who said, I loved it, I loved it. And then the second survey, and these surveys were thirty, forty answers, they were quick Twitter polls and whatnot. The second survey said the same thing.

21% said I loved it, and 79% said I wish I was in Germany at the live meeting. So the idea is that number one, there's a clear cut 25% of people who really love this kind of meeting. But that most of us crave the social interaction, the Bavarian beer or whatever we were gonna get by being in Frankfurt. So what would be downside for you Rachel? Let's start with, what did you think?

Well, I'll tell you, I struggled with some connectivity issues in the beginning. And I know I'm not alone because we did a poll on that as well. For me, that was just part of the game, right? You know, it's just like when you travel to expect delays, same kind of thing when you're talking about ULAR twenty twenty for me for the e congress. You guys know me best.

I am a I'm way better in person and I do not love virtual hugs. I much prefer a real hug. So aside from connectivity issues, I would say I really miss that interaction. I miss seeing people and that for me, you know, I love the exhibitor shakedown that we do at ACR every year and I think that I miss that, you know, I miss being able to be a part of something that feels like you're bigger because you're with a lot of people and you have the opportunity to interact.

Kat, what do you think?

I agree with Rachel. I mean, part of the learning experience is actually when you get to talk to your colleagues, you kind of rehash, like, what the studies, you know, are saying, and do you agree with it? Do you not agree with it? You know, it's that socialization, but yet also academia interface that I do miss. And, you know, the other thing is, normally when I'm at a meeting, I usually get in like 15,000 to 20,000 steps a day.

So I had to shut ULUR down for a while and go get my own steps in.

That's a tragedy.

But, I mean, if you were to talk about, you know, there are limitations, obviously, with virtual learning. But for the most part, I would say that if there are things that I could do better or things that I wish would happen, just like what you mentioned about the abstract, I mean, they could have done a poster tour. Have one of their key opinion leaders, I mean, prerecord, and take you from step to step of each different posters. You know, click on Jack Cush, he'll take you through the tour of rheumatoid arthritis and early arthritis. Click on, you know, Joan Merrill for a tour of lupus.

I think that that would be, like, really exciting in the future if that was an option. But I really do enjoy the fact that I can click on certain abstracts, and those abstracts do have the authors on there presenting their own data and the key points of it.

What else would you like to have seen or what else was not good enough? Rachel, what about the shakedown?

Well, I mean, as you guys

What the pharma shakedown? Is that what you call it?

No, I call it the exhibitor. Well, it changes kind of every year, but it's usually the exhibitor shakedown. We try to be all inclusive, Jack, you know, RheumNow.

Not just pharma, right?

Not just pharma. Well, you guys know what it is, but I'll just kind of summarize it. It started out as a joke, as a satire in 2016 with ACR and really it looks at, it takes a list of very important key opinion leaders who remain anonymous, who go to each of the different exhibitors or vendors in the Exhibitor Halls and they rate back on fun items such as who has the best sweet treat or who has the best free takeaway, but really the goal, the strategy behind it has nothing to do with the sweet treat or the takeaway. It has everything to do with taking the kind of really large Exhibitor Hall and breaking it down so that people who would not normally go to the Exhibitor Hall would find it as an educational experience, would be more open to the experience and would interact with each other in different ways that we're not used to, whether that be with a medical science liaison, if you're a fellow or, you know, being able to walk up to Jack Cush and say, hey, Doctor. Cush, I just saw you do this wonderful, know, this great topic and I have a question about it.

It kind of demystifies the experience. And so not being able to be part of, a live meeting, we don't get that, right? And so it's just another option for access from an educational experience. Obviously it's very serious, I take it very seriously, but it's also something that I missed this year. And even David Liu called us out on it.

He said, you know, we can't have it on ice forever. We're gonna have to bring it back, but he's right. And it just goes to show you what you're missing when you're not at a live meeting, but, we'll find a way.

So there are a lot of people who would be happy with not having to go to the Exhibitor Floor or be with exhibitors. There are many people who are not happy about that. I mean, Catherine, was no wellness, go over and play with the dogs or do yoga or whatever. If you're gonna have a virtual meeting, should you have an exhibitor experience and what would that look like?

It's probably gonna be like sponsored by in the corner of your computer, click here for a free sample and a drug rep will come and call you. I mean, I don't know. There are some plus and minuses about not having a lot of ads inundated through the meeting. And, you know, I get it that, you know, a lot of industry does support the meeting and that, you know, they're so important in developing the drugs that we use for our patients. And so, I mean, I think that I have fun at the Exhibitor hall because you just kind of are able to relax and just meet up with some friends.

I mean, that's what I think. And I think that virtually there could be a similar experience. Do you know, like, one of the best things about RoomNow Live, Jack, I don't think I ever told you this, is the fact that there's a sidebar where people can actually comment real time. Like, this is real time. Like, whoever is on at that time.

There was somebody from India on there. There was somebody from Pakistan. Somebody was from Brazil and obviously me in Dallas. But it was interaction and the interplay as we're watching a presentation or as we're listening, we're typing back and forth like, oh my God, this is awesome. Hey, did you see his cat walk behind his screen?

You know, so it's those kinds of interactions that the live meetings that we want, that I think you can simulate in a virtual flat platform.

Yeah, that cross chat ability makes it very human because that's kind of what you would do if you were in a room with a bunch of people. I'd be leaning over to Rachel and said, I don't really believe this. Do you? Or you'd have that kind of conversation. Any comments about navigating the meeting?

Was it easy? Was it difficult? Kat, what did you think?

Initially it's trial by error because I didn't realize you're supposed to click view session in a live session. And I kept clicking on the session itself and it's like meeting not available yet. And I'm like, but it's time. What do you mean it's not available? And then I looked up and I was like, oh, it's this link.

Yeah, it's and there were no instructions. I wish there was like a quick 10 page tip on how to navigate EULAR.

Yeah,

totally agree. Kept, I mean, think for the first day I thought, wow, somebody gave me a doctorate but I cannot figure out how to flip in between what this page needs. But once I got the hang of it, I think it was a little bit easier. But for me, it just wasn't quite on point upfront, but it did it did supply me with the information I needed. I I felt like I was a day behind by the time I figured it out.

Right. Right.

Did you notice that you can log in multiple times and have like multiple different screens?

That's why it helps to have multiple monitors going. Yeah. I mean, was both good and a little crazy when someone comes and sees, what are you doing? It's sort of like, you've got maybe too much going on there. But let's end up with advice for the people who are going to make future meetings because virtual meetings may very well be a big part of our future going forward.

What can we impart to make them better knowing that we need, if we're gonna do this and have more people love them, need special meetings to deal with these special times. What would be your advice? I have something but Rachel, do you have something that you wanna suggest?

Well, Kat already hit on it, but she's one of my mentors, so it would make sense. I love the sidebar option. I think if you're going to have a virtual meeting where you're allowing for interaction, obviously a Q and A session, if you can do it and you can figure out how to even score people's questions up based on if it's your question too.

Yeah, upvoting and downvoting you call that.

Exactly, upvoting and downvoting for importance of questions I think is really important and something that we do with RheumNow Live but I love the sidebar. If you have the opportunity to engage in a slightly different way especially with your peers that are all across the globe, right? Who are just commenting on something that they found important or that they didn't know or the cat in the background. I think that's really important and it kind of, it doesn't bridge the gap fully for what you're missing with the human interaction aspect of it but it really does humanize a virtual experience so you don't get I like to call it Zoom gloom where at the end of the day, I'm not like this because I need that. I have always been that way.

It's important. Obviously I would love to do a wellness center but since ACR just rolled out the dogs last year, I don't know how to incorporate that just yet other than by petting my own dog. But I think to make it a human aspect, can be achieved, it just takes some foresight to do it. That's my number one takeaway about what we can do for virtual meetings for the future.

Kat, what's your suggestions?

I don't think virtual massages really work, know. I don't know if that's gonna be working nor is that relaxing. Yeah, so one of the things that I also had a difficult time with is that I couldn't understand some people's accent. And if they could have closed captioning on the bottom, I would like that. The other thing that would also would be good is, you know, like and I always wanted ACR to do this.

I threw this comment out a few years ago, but nobody took the bait in terms of my suggestion. But I would love to have, like, a running kind of like ticker at the very bottom that tells me what the most recent news are for, like, that's going on and, you know, so but in terms of poster meetings, like I said, you can have a poster meeting virtual tour. You can also have, like, meet the professor Zoom room. So those are the things that I would do.

Well, so one you're asking for model your presentations after CNN or ESPN, have a bottom third news ticker or in room, you know, whatever in session, Doctor. Emery is talking about the latest in ultrasound and MRI or whatever you want. And then I think you I like your idea that when I was going to go there too, and that is you need to design the meeting to engage different types of learners. What we all learn differently, the way you are was set up, it was really set up for one type of learner. And that is the researcher, the hunter, the person who's willing to sit in front of that screen, maybe have five screens open and find that data.

That's how Catherine works. I mean, she's really good at that. And she likes to have that. Me, I'm a little too ADD and I need distractions like squirrel. And I'll go and learn that and I'll come back to this abstract on Arctic rewind and what that means.

So you need to have tracks for different kinds of learners. And I think there are the hunter researchers who can basically grind. They don't need anything, they're gonna find it on their own and make it easy with navigation for them to do that. But then there are the followers, people who are like, I don't know, this is so too much. They need the poster tours, they need to meet the professors.

This is the gout track. Here's the gout track. You should look at these top 10 as rated by our poster tour gout experts, that sort of thing. And I think that maybe what they should do is foster the idea of what actually both of you as faculty for ACR twenty nineteen, we ask you, what did you recommend people do? A lot of you, I think both of you said this, and that is learner groups.

Get together with five of your friends, go and attack the meeting and then come back and let's have a beer at Chili's and let's talk about what we saw today and have that interaction so that you can again, get more of what Kat was talking about earlier. The idea to sit down and say, I don't know, did you really get that thing about FDG PET and why would they do it in Behcet's disease, for instance? So I think learner groups would help, but again, tracks for different people. And I think that then you'll end up with more people who are less confused and feel more rewarded by the investment of money and time. And that's really what we're talking about.

This is a lot of time to sit in front of your computer three and a half days. I mean, that's like you're in laws for three and a half days, really? My beeper is going up, but you don't have a beeper, Doctor. Cush. No, no, I do, I gotta go, goodbye.

So any final comments?

I'm looking forward to ACR. So it's gonna be interesting to see how ACR is going to handle this with the pandemic. Are they going to limit only 25% or 50% of participants to be able to come and only from certain countries? Or, you know, what's going to happen? But I believe that ACR is going to deliver quality content.

I think that you are very innovative, Jack, in conducting RoomNow live the way you did to be able to incorporate the virtual format, probably way ahead everybody's thinking and the fact that you just were always one step ahead. So I mean, kudos to you for that and really appreciate, know, you LAR for putting all this together so quickly.

Absolutely. Rachel, your final comments.

I I feel the same way. I think again, you LAR did an astronomical improvement on what it could have been or not even having the conference to begin with. So I really, I applaud the effort. I thought it went pretty smoothly and I thought it was a great opportunity for people who wouldn't have been able to attend to make it a little bit easier. I am actually hopeful that ACR is able to do something similar, partially again, because of my own medical conditions recently.

So it would be nice to be able to attend. I know that just like you, LAR, there's gonna be quality content and I know it just needs to be in a bite size chunkable form for people. And if we can have a few more tracks and some of the ideas that we've talked about tonight to make that learning more accessible to all different learning types, I think it's gonna go well and I think people will be more challenged to attend as opposed to just saying, ah, it's ACR, it's such a big meeting. If you can take it and make it more attainable for people, there's no excuse for us not to attend. And then if you really want to make it something that is special and unique, I do think, know, Kat's right, you emulate what some of the things and some of the features that ULAr has done that RheumNow live has done and you make an amalgamation that works for the whole group for ACR.

I just feel really blessed to have this conversation. I think this is a really pertinent conversation. It's an important topic and it's very timely. So I'm glad we can talk about it openly. There's nobody else, you guys.

There's no one else I'd rather talk about this with. And it's just, it's been nice. It's an I miss you and I love seeing you. So that's it. That's my thought.

Well, it is great to be here with friends, Doctor. Stow and Tate. I want to clarify for the audience, we do not know at this point how the ACR is going to have its annual meeting, whether it's going to be virtual or it's going to be live. My guess is it might be both. And I think that, but I know that they're working hard on how they can deliver the content, which as Catherine pointed out, there's gonna be a content, there's gonna be the content we wanna see.

So we have faith in ECR and coming up with a good program. I think this discussion was helpful for us and for others. Good night everyone. Enjoy your content.