CASE HISTORY

American Thyroid Association (ATA)

Falls Church, Va., USA Largest meeting ATA Annual Meeting Last year Sept. 19–23, 2012, Quebec City This year Oct. 16–20, 2013, Puerto Rico Next year Oct. 29–Nov. 2, 2014, Coronado, Calif. convn.org/ata-2013

“Our Annual Meeting is primarily for endocrinologists and basic research scientists who have a primary interest in the thyroid,” said Barbara Smith, CAE, ATA’s executive director. “Typically, we have over a thousand, maybe 1,100 attendees. One-fourth of those are international; they come from outside the Americas. There is a good balance of basic science and clinical. We have a relatively small ex- hibit hall, around 30 exhibitors, five of which are members of our ATA Alliance for Patient Education. When people come together at the American Thyroid Association, they are really coming together in order to work on guidelines for thyroid management and clinical management of thy- roid disease, as well as coming together for research into all aspects of thyroid, both basic and clinical.”

Sunshine Act here in the States, but there are many countries that have a Sunshine Act, and again, it’s understanding all of those different compliances and how they will impact your meeting. And that’s terribly burdensome. We’re still trying to get questions answered here about the U.S. Sunshine Act that will be implemented as of Aug. 1. Even though we’re doing international meetings, we do have U.S. speakers. Does it apply when they’re abroad? How does that impact the society, or is that just a reporting [man- date] for industry?

What are some new developments around medical meetings that you’re excited about? BS I’m part of a patient advocacy board that the Society of Nuclear Medicine [and Molecular Imag- ing (SNMMI)] started. Because [ATA has] this alliance of five [patient] organizations, I go on their behalf. I represent the patients. [SNMMI’s Annual] Meeting was fascinating. They have a full-day workshop where their patients hear from the scientists and the physicians about their particular issues. And then we partnered with the patients and took them through the exhibit hall. Their exhibit hall is overwhelming because of all the machinery, all of the MRI machines and that kind of thing.

Because of the Internet and all the patients that are learning so much online — not necessar-

year, and if, for example, we start having ideas from the Dutch Society of Cardiology to have the queen of Holland or some- thing like that coming, that is something that we would actu- ally fight off. The danger would be more the national rather than the international.

This might not be as much for an issue for the international societies, but has the implementation of health-care reform in the United States — Obamacare — affected your meetings? BH Well, the problem is our direct member countries — we’ve got 54 of them, and they’ve all got their own health- care reforms. It just leaves everything up in the air and it increases all the funding issues for people coming and so on. It just makes it that much more complex. We can’t get into any one issue, or any one area of legislation, because there’s just too many to handle.

LA More than just Obamacare is the whole Sunshine Act [provision of the Affordable Care Act] and how this is going to impact our corporate partners and how that trickledown effect will impact us as a society. People think about the new

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ily good information, but they’re taking into their physician reams of paper and information — I think that will be the new frontier, if you will, of patients participating in a much greater degree. Not only in receiving the education, but in informing their physicians about what’s important.

BH What I find exciting is the fact that the meetings that we do are beginning to be spread over the whole year. The whole question of going mobile, going digital, going remote, going paperless — all of that kind of thing — and the fact that our meetings are a way to engage people throughout the whole year, I think, takes it towards something which has more value and goes beyond just the venue. It’s going to add to the overall impact of what we do. A lot of us that work for associa- tions, we do have the hope that we’re actually doing some- thing that shows a higher cause than just share value and so on, and I think that the way that things are evolving means that our work will improve the impact that the professions that we represent have on society.

. Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene. PCMA.ORG