The evolution of virtual events for today’s medical community

The current event landscape

It is clear that face-to-face (F2F) engagement has experienced a dramatic decline throughout 2020, affecting industries and interactions across the globe. And while virtual events have already been around for quite some time, certain industries – such as medical, pharmaceutical and life sciences – have been slow to pivot and adopt new solutions for digital events and engagement. However, the powerful trigger of COVID-19 has created a new reality which is causing these industries to pick up the pace and shift their approach to events in response.

Evolving to virtual events across the medical community

Prior to 2020, the medical community – including healthcare professionals (HCPs), pharmaceutical manufacturers, scientists, researchers, etc. – very much relied on in-person events for critical engagement, training and development, and the sharing of new medical products and innovations. In fact, the average life sciences company typically conducts more than 20 different types of events over the lifecycle of a drug, ranging from speaker programs to medical advisory boards to investigator meetings¹. This may explain why this particular community has been historically reluctant when it comes to virtual events.

Outside of life sciences, virtual events have become extremely creative and a common approach to cover both large or regional audiences while providing targeted and tactical content for multiple sessions. And with the pandemic driving the medical community to try different approaches for their events, this has brought to light important insights which can’t be ignored:

1. The medical community is now more favourable to the execution of virtual events due to clear cost cuts and the fact that technology no longer scares like it used to; and
2. HCPs benefit from not having to travel multiple days in order to attend and learn from events.

Yet recent Veeva Pulse data revealed that events decreased by 55% between January and July of this year², indicating that medical and marketing teams are grappling with this challenge of developing, and quickly executing, event strategies that still allow for necessary engagement and sharing of important information to occur while also becoming less reliant on F2F gatherings for the foreseeable future.

Rethinking event content, structure and technology for the future

For HCPs and the pharmaceutical industry, which in-person events have been fundamental to their operations until this year, there is now no choice but to evolve and respond to these changing times. The medical community must now rethink, and develop a solution around, the following in order to make a smooth transition to virtual:

• How they bring messages and content across to their audiences; and
• What the right structure and technology should be to support this content.

When these elements are considered with an experimental attitude, medical and marketing teams can open new doors and develop a seamless event journey with a full view of all audience interactions.

With Veeva APAC Commercial Summit Online, you can hear from SpotMe, a virtual event platform vendor, and Amgen, one of the world’s leading biotechnology companies, as they discuss the sudden challenges they’ve faced and adapted to when it comes to hosting medical events today. Register to access the on-demand presentation now through November 30th, 2020.

To know more how companies have adapted to hosting medical events today, please contact Giorgio Castellini

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¹ Veeva Global CRM Events Management Pulse Data, March 2020.
² Veeva APAC CRM Events Management Pulsa Data, July 2020.