Background

It is now more than 12 months since the IME industry has had to deal with the fallout from lockdown, quarantine, travel restrictions and of course largely working from home and what this means for medical education. However, because every educational format that we have designed is capable of being moved to a virtual format, whether that is by live broadcast or broadcast of pre-recorded materials, we are always in a good position to embrace change. Here’s how we did it.

How we went about it

By and large things have become a little less expensive due to the fact that there are virtually no travel budgets for our teams and for faculty, certainly no venue costs. 

We were one of the first providers to give immediate options for virtual rather than live events and this has meant reduced costs in most cases, although there are some rare instances where more complicated virtual solutions are actually more expensive – but these are the exception rather than the rule. 

We’ve been able to reflect reduced costs in our budgets, and pass any cost savings on to our supporters and we will continue to do that.

We’ve also spent time thinking how we go about maintaining interactivity in a virtual setting. That is where working more intuitively within our formats comes in, we are constantly reviewing our formats, using technology to engineer the most engaging way to provide medical education. It doesn’t stop with the technology though, we work closely with our faculty to ensure that presentations, discussions and talks are delivered in a fashion to hold the audience’s attention, which has required working with our teams to adjust presentation styles. This is an iterative process, and our formats will be updated regularly as well as new ones being launched.