The Paperless Conference by Raj Chand, MD
Friday, January 29, 2010 
Raj Chand, MDI hate being beaten—especially by neurosurgeons. Although, this time the neurosurgeons are clearly ahead of the game. Stacey Burling from the Philadelphia Inquirer reported this week that the American Association of Neurological Surgeons annual meeting in May will be completely paperless. All attendees will receive an iTouch that is preloaded with all conference documents — agendas, abstracts, vendor information, and advertising. With 3500 attendees, they estimate saving half-a-million pages.
5000 people attended the 2009 ACEP Scientific Assembly, and ACEP’s 2010 roster of meetings runs eight single spaced pages deep. One can only imagine how much paper emergency physicians are consuming at our professional events.
Yes, there are limitations to this approach. Not everyone has a handheld device, and some people still prefer paper. However, many physicians use iPhones, Blackberries, and other devices every day—and the numbers continue to grow.
Conferences ought to spend resources on developing eco-friendly tools, rather than the compulsory logo emblazoned bags and binders we receive at registration and often leave behind after the event. A recent trend in food shopping is bringing your own reusable grocery bags. Like the grocery store, physicians should bring our own handheld devices to conferences and help eliminate some of the waste choking our plane
Image courtesy of www.moonshadowmobile.com
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For those of you interested in the how health IT affects emergency medicine, there are two upcoming conferences that will be focusing on the latest trends. I will be covering both conferences for em-blog.com so stay tuned here for updates:
International mHealth Networking Conference, February 3-4, 2010, Washington, DC
The mHealth initiative focuses on 12 domains where mobile technology is poised to advance healthcare. Topics include enhancing patient-provider communication, impact of new applications to bedside care, disease management, monitoring, reimbursement, and policy.
HIMSS 2010, March 1-4, 2010, Atlanta, GA
HIMSS (Health Information and Management Systems Society) is the granddaddy of all health IT conferences. It promises to be a huge event with nearly 30,000 attendees expected, and well known keynotes—Dan Hesse (CEO of Sprint), David Blumenthal (National Coordinator for Health Information Technology), Sanjay Gupta (CNN), Harry Markopolos (Fraud Investigator), and Sully Sullenberger (US Airways pilot).
I will be twittering live from each event. Follow me @rajchand, or use the hash tags below to track my comments on the conferences:
- mHealth conference: #mhealthconf
- HIMSS 2010: #emhimss
Reader Comments (6)
Were you not at ACEP 2009? They gave out a flash drive with all the lecture syllabi on them. I don't know it was a true paperless conference, and it's not as gee-whiz as giving out ipods, but it's the same idea, innit?
Same occurred at the Nov 09 ACEM annual scientific meeting in Australia. This meeting was both sponsorless and (almost) paperless. The abstracts were all on a memory stick (I guess we can't call them "papers" any more). There was a very compact paper program which worked for everyone - no need for a device (except reading glasses for the small font).
Technology isn't always the answer.......
Nice post.
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