The RheumNow Week In Review 23 June 2017 - How To EULAR - ACR Save
The RheumNow Week In Review 23 June 2017 - How To EULAR - ACR by Dr. Cush
Transcription
This is the Room Now We Can Review, 06/23/2017, and I'm Jack Cush, executive editor of theroomnow.com. I'm going to talk to you today about ULAARs. Last week was ULAAR, and this is the ULAAR wrap up video. I could go over maybe the highlights. I think I covered the highlights throughout the meeting with my day one, two, three and four reports and sort of the endless tweets that we did.
In fact, if you didn't follow anything from ULAR and you want to, you can go to our microsite at rheumnow which is ular2017.roomnow.com and you can see a cavalcade of reports and tweets and pictures and quotes that sort of gave you the feel and the content and the knowledge of having attended the meeting in Spain last week. The meeting was held in Madrid and it was, I think, a good meeting. Overall, it went fast. It was jam packed with people and presentations, and maybe most notably, it was quite hot. It was on a good day, was Fahrenheit and there were two days when it hit 104.
And it was a convention center that was both indoors and outdoors. So, if you had to run from session to session, you were going to sweat and you were looking for some water. A lot of the sessions were reasonably air conditioned. A lot of sessions were very well attended. When there was air conditioning and good education involved, the room was jam packed.
In fact, lunchtime, Burger King was really jam packed even by Europeans who don't like Burger King, but they certainly do appreciate the air conditioning. So, I want to review, however, for you the approach to the meeting and maybe some of the things that I've learned from going to meetings over the years. First is how are you going to learn? And it really begins with preparation. I think it begins with either what you do on your flight to the meeting, getting the program in its electronic format, or the book and reviewing it.
I think a key step in preparing for the meeting is getting the app. Both ULAR and ACR have a very functional app which you can use to highlight the sessions that you like and in doing so, when you choose a session or presentation that you like, it goes into the calendar and then you can follow my calendar today and tomorrow and you can see exactly where it is that you're going to be, need to be, what the next presentation is that you're going look at. So that's very, very important. So once you have the app and once you start to personalize it with your own entries, then you can start to map out the rest of your week. It is highly important that you also have the book.
I think it's easier sometimes to look at the program book day by day, the night before the meeting, and maybe while you're going to the meeting, and highlight the sessions you need to go to and highlight the posters or the presentations that are most important to you. In fact, it's really important day by day to know what is most important for you to see today and then work around that. For instance, if the most important thing you're going to see today is the abstracts on scleroderma, you might as well spend most of your morning or afternoon on the abstract floor looking at posters that are around that, related to that. A lot of good education comes out of that. If you're trying to do two poster presentations and then run to a concurrent session and then run to plenary and then get back to the posters, you're going to really exert a lot of energy with not as much benefit as you might hope.
So number one, have a number one, two, three priority and then say geographically around that. Again, when you start to identify the things that are most important, put it into the app, put it into your schedule so you'll know what to do. With the app, you can sort of map out your time and map out where it is that you need to be because it'll look at my schedule and it'll tell you what's going on right now and again, now you know where you're going to be. It's important that you also identify the things that are most important topics to you. If you're the pseudo gout guy or if you think your future is going to be related to the utility of calprotectin levels, you might want to do those searches even before you go to the meeting and put those into your program book and into your app.
Again, having a number one priority presentation to see, having your topics of interest loaded up, again, makes for an easy map of what you're going to do when covering the meeting. You should also take stock of the meeting at some point. Sometimes that means having meetings with colleagues or with the, if you're a fellow, with the program director to review what you saw at the meeting and learn from each other. One of the most popular things at the ACR meeting is Arti Kavanaugh and I doing the Rheumatology Roundup, where we give you our 10 to 15 best abstracts from the meeting. And people like to hear that because they want to know, did I see that?
Why does he think that's important? And sort of discussion interchange that is highly valuable in learning something from the meeting. So making sure you have that forum, and you can do that online by participating in social media and in tweeting the things that you think are important. Again, Ronan Kavanaugh said that what it takes to focus the mind to deliver an important message in 140 characters is unlike any other sort of exercise. You have to be well thought out.
You have to understand what it is that you want to transmit. You just can't say, Hey, I went to Starbucks, isn't that interesting? No, it's not. But if you can tell me about the calprotectin abstract and why it wasn't that much better than doing traditional measures such as the CDI or the DAS, that is actually more instructive for both you and for the audience. Second on my agenda is where you stay.
A lot of people don't know where to stay and you should look at just these two meetings that are most important right now. One is the UR meeting that just happened in Madrid, and the next meeting is the ACR meeting that's going to be held in San Diego. Two very different sites. And I would say that for most places, like Madrid, where you stay doesn't matter because in Madrid, no matter where you stayed, the convention center was far from downtown. The airport was not close to either of those.
And it turns out that wherever you stayed, it was going be a plane, train, and automobile to get to your meeting or your session that you want to go to. So maybe what's most important is that you're staying in a hotel where your colleagues, friends, and workmates are going to be. That's really important because that's when you get the most amount of fun, the most amount of education. You can do the best planning for how you're to get to the meeting, what you're doing after the meeting, etcetera. San Diego is different.
San Diego, the meeting is downtown, the hotels are right around the convention center, but the same principles apply. Be in a hotel where your friends and your workmates are going to be vitally important. What about your day? Day by day, how do you plan your day? Well, the most important thing about your day is to make sure you get plenty of sleep the night before.
The second most important thing is make sure you get a great breakfast before you go to the meeting because you will not get any food of any substance at the meeting. In fact, the auditoriums have no food. The hallways have got those little carts that are basically selling soda and junk. The cafeteria that's associated with the convention center, most of those have been condemned by the Board of Health and just reopened prior to the meeting. So you may not want to eat there.
Get a great breakfast, bring some power bars and or snacks that you can eat during the meeting and maybe you'll get time to sit down and have coffee or to have a drink or a light something to eat while you're at the meeting, but your big meal has got to be breakfast and it's got to be dinner. For that matter, dinner is maybe your second most important meal, which means that you really need to plan ahead of time where you're going to eat dinner. Don't be haphazard about this. Most of these cities have great dinners and you may not know where to go and if you're not going to go on Google or Yelp to find out where to go, talk to the drug companies. You know what?
They got a bunch of dinners planned at great restaurants that they've chosen and while those may or may not be within your price range, you now have a starting point for at least where the good restaurants are and where the great dining is going to be. This is vitally important when you go to a European meeting like in Barcelona, Madrid or pretty much anywhere, Berlin, London, Paris, etcetera. They know where to go. It's all new territory for you. So find out where you're going go, go out with friends, enjoy yourself, get a good night's sleep.
Next, what about the Exhibition Hall, the exhibit floor itself? You need to know how to navigate that thing. You could get lost in there. Those are sort of designed for you to get lost in there and they have attractions that are sort of like squirrel and you go over there and it looks like it's something and usually it's nothing. So a plan for the exhibit floor is important.
Now, if you happen to be a Starbucks loving, frappe, latte, cappuccino kind of nut job, you're going to love the exhibit floor at these meetings because they're all coffee, all exotic coffees, something that is supposed to be tea but really isn't tea, and that's about it. You'll never find anything else of substance. The food, they're like sort of edible trinkets. They're really not food and they're really not worth going after. I mean, where's the water?
It's hard to find. You have to buy a bottle out in the hallway from the soda vendors. For that matter, where's the juice and where's the Doctor Pepper? Those should be on the exhibit floor. But then again, they don't ask me to design the exhibit floors.
So again, you need a strategy. I'm going up this aisle, I'm going down that aisle, I got to meet someone at the Genentech booth, whatever it is that you want to do. I mean, I think that recognize though there's a trap there that your time is going to be better spent meeting with friends in the hallways in front of posters rather than lounging with three d goggles on inside of an exhibit booth. Again, I don't know if that's a good use of your time. And lastly, again, the wrap up of the meeting should be where you get together with colleagues and discuss the things that were important to you.
So that could be a dinner that you arrange with friends in your town when everybody gets back home after the ACR. That could be a program done at the university. That could be an online thing. That could be a lecture that's given. But I think to have a way of rehashing the meeting, that's what we're trying to do at roomnow.com.
We're trying to present the meeting for you to review and learn some of the things that you might have missed, get perspective of reporters that we have on what it was that we thought was important. I mean, covered at the UBAR meeting, I covered wearable technologies, long term outcomes and comorbidities in JIA patients, in addition to all the big trials. There's a lot more than the big trials and lupus, rheumatoid, psoriatic, and ankylosing spondylitis. And again, maybe you need to hear from colleagues about what was interesting in those regards. For you to get involved in social media, I think would also be a good idea.
That's it for this week at roomnow.com. Be sure to go to the microsites or look at ULAAR, ular2017.roomnow.com, and you can scroll through that and see what happened on day one, day two. We got a subsection in there on Gout alone that was sponsored by Horizon and I think you'll find all of it really quite interesting. See you next week.
In fact, if you didn't follow anything from ULAR and you want to, you can go to our microsite at rheumnow which is ular2017.roomnow.com and you can see a cavalcade of reports and tweets and pictures and quotes that sort of gave you the feel and the content and the knowledge of having attended the meeting in Spain last week. The meeting was held in Madrid and it was, I think, a good meeting. Overall, it went fast. It was jam packed with people and presentations, and maybe most notably, it was quite hot. It was on a good day, was Fahrenheit and there were two days when it hit 104.
And it was a convention center that was both indoors and outdoors. So, if you had to run from session to session, you were going to sweat and you were looking for some water. A lot of the sessions were reasonably air conditioned. A lot of sessions were very well attended. When there was air conditioning and good education involved, the room was jam packed.
In fact, lunchtime, Burger King was really jam packed even by Europeans who don't like Burger King, but they certainly do appreciate the air conditioning. So, I want to review, however, for you the approach to the meeting and maybe some of the things that I've learned from going to meetings over the years. First is how are you going to learn? And it really begins with preparation. I think it begins with either what you do on your flight to the meeting, getting the program in its electronic format, or the book and reviewing it.
I think a key step in preparing for the meeting is getting the app. Both ULAR and ACR have a very functional app which you can use to highlight the sessions that you like and in doing so, when you choose a session or presentation that you like, it goes into the calendar and then you can follow my calendar today and tomorrow and you can see exactly where it is that you're going to be, need to be, what the next presentation is that you're going look at. So that's very, very important. So once you have the app and once you start to personalize it with your own entries, then you can start to map out the rest of your week. It is highly important that you also have the book.
I think it's easier sometimes to look at the program book day by day, the night before the meeting, and maybe while you're going to the meeting, and highlight the sessions you need to go to and highlight the posters or the presentations that are most important to you. In fact, it's really important day by day to know what is most important for you to see today and then work around that. For instance, if the most important thing you're going to see today is the abstracts on scleroderma, you might as well spend most of your morning or afternoon on the abstract floor looking at posters that are around that, related to that. A lot of good education comes out of that. If you're trying to do two poster presentations and then run to a concurrent session and then run to plenary and then get back to the posters, you're going to really exert a lot of energy with not as much benefit as you might hope.
So number one, have a number one, two, three priority and then say geographically around that. Again, when you start to identify the things that are most important, put it into the app, put it into your schedule so you'll know what to do. With the app, you can sort of map out your time and map out where it is that you need to be because it'll look at my schedule and it'll tell you what's going on right now and again, now you know where you're going to be. It's important that you also identify the things that are most important topics to you. If you're the pseudo gout guy or if you think your future is going to be related to the utility of calprotectin levels, you might want to do those searches even before you go to the meeting and put those into your program book and into your app.
Again, having a number one priority presentation to see, having your topics of interest loaded up, again, makes for an easy map of what you're going to do when covering the meeting. You should also take stock of the meeting at some point. Sometimes that means having meetings with colleagues or with the, if you're a fellow, with the program director to review what you saw at the meeting and learn from each other. One of the most popular things at the ACR meeting is Arti Kavanaugh and I doing the Rheumatology Roundup, where we give you our 10 to 15 best abstracts from the meeting. And people like to hear that because they want to know, did I see that?
Why does he think that's important? And sort of discussion interchange that is highly valuable in learning something from the meeting. So making sure you have that forum, and you can do that online by participating in social media and in tweeting the things that you think are important. Again, Ronan Kavanaugh said that what it takes to focus the mind to deliver an important message in 140 characters is unlike any other sort of exercise. You have to be well thought out.
You have to understand what it is that you want to transmit. You just can't say, Hey, I went to Starbucks, isn't that interesting? No, it's not. But if you can tell me about the calprotectin abstract and why it wasn't that much better than doing traditional measures such as the CDI or the DAS, that is actually more instructive for both you and for the audience. Second on my agenda is where you stay.
A lot of people don't know where to stay and you should look at just these two meetings that are most important right now. One is the UR meeting that just happened in Madrid, and the next meeting is the ACR meeting that's going to be held in San Diego. Two very different sites. And I would say that for most places, like Madrid, where you stay doesn't matter because in Madrid, no matter where you stayed, the convention center was far from downtown. The airport was not close to either of those.
And it turns out that wherever you stayed, it was going be a plane, train, and automobile to get to your meeting or your session that you want to go to. So maybe what's most important is that you're staying in a hotel where your colleagues, friends, and workmates are going to be. That's really important because that's when you get the most amount of fun, the most amount of education. You can do the best planning for how you're to get to the meeting, what you're doing after the meeting, etcetera. San Diego is different.
San Diego, the meeting is downtown, the hotels are right around the convention center, but the same principles apply. Be in a hotel where your friends and your workmates are going to be vitally important. What about your day? Day by day, how do you plan your day? Well, the most important thing about your day is to make sure you get plenty of sleep the night before.
The second most important thing is make sure you get a great breakfast before you go to the meeting because you will not get any food of any substance at the meeting. In fact, the auditoriums have no food. The hallways have got those little carts that are basically selling soda and junk. The cafeteria that's associated with the convention center, most of those have been condemned by the Board of Health and just reopened prior to the meeting. So you may not want to eat there.
Get a great breakfast, bring some power bars and or snacks that you can eat during the meeting and maybe you'll get time to sit down and have coffee or to have a drink or a light something to eat while you're at the meeting, but your big meal has got to be breakfast and it's got to be dinner. For that matter, dinner is maybe your second most important meal, which means that you really need to plan ahead of time where you're going to eat dinner. Don't be haphazard about this. Most of these cities have great dinners and you may not know where to go and if you're not going to go on Google or Yelp to find out where to go, talk to the drug companies. You know what?
They got a bunch of dinners planned at great restaurants that they've chosen and while those may or may not be within your price range, you now have a starting point for at least where the good restaurants are and where the great dining is going to be. This is vitally important when you go to a European meeting like in Barcelona, Madrid or pretty much anywhere, Berlin, London, Paris, etcetera. They know where to go. It's all new territory for you. So find out where you're going go, go out with friends, enjoy yourself, get a good night's sleep.
Next, what about the Exhibition Hall, the exhibit floor itself? You need to know how to navigate that thing. You could get lost in there. Those are sort of designed for you to get lost in there and they have attractions that are sort of like squirrel and you go over there and it looks like it's something and usually it's nothing. So a plan for the exhibit floor is important.
Now, if you happen to be a Starbucks loving, frappe, latte, cappuccino kind of nut job, you're going to love the exhibit floor at these meetings because they're all coffee, all exotic coffees, something that is supposed to be tea but really isn't tea, and that's about it. You'll never find anything else of substance. The food, they're like sort of edible trinkets. They're really not food and they're really not worth going after. I mean, where's the water?
It's hard to find. You have to buy a bottle out in the hallway from the soda vendors. For that matter, where's the juice and where's the Doctor Pepper? Those should be on the exhibit floor. But then again, they don't ask me to design the exhibit floors.
So again, you need a strategy. I'm going up this aisle, I'm going down that aisle, I got to meet someone at the Genentech booth, whatever it is that you want to do. I mean, I think that recognize though there's a trap there that your time is going to be better spent meeting with friends in the hallways in front of posters rather than lounging with three d goggles on inside of an exhibit booth. Again, I don't know if that's a good use of your time. And lastly, again, the wrap up of the meeting should be where you get together with colleagues and discuss the things that were important to you.
So that could be a dinner that you arrange with friends in your town when everybody gets back home after the ACR. That could be a program done at the university. That could be an online thing. That could be a lecture that's given. But I think to have a way of rehashing the meeting, that's what we're trying to do at roomnow.com.
We're trying to present the meeting for you to review and learn some of the things that you might have missed, get perspective of reporters that we have on what it was that we thought was important. I mean, covered at the UBAR meeting, I covered wearable technologies, long term outcomes and comorbidities in JIA patients, in addition to all the big trials. There's a lot more than the big trials and lupus, rheumatoid, psoriatic, and ankylosing spondylitis. And again, maybe you need to hear from colleagues about what was interesting in those regards. For you to get involved in social media, I think would also be a good idea.
That's it for this week at roomnow.com. Be sure to go to the microsites or look at ULAAR, ular2017.roomnow.com, and you can scroll through that and see what happened on day one, day two. We got a subsection in there on Gout alone that was sponsored by Horizon and I think you'll find all of it really quite interesting. See you next week.
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