AI, new technology major focus at 2024 AACE annual meeting
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Key takeaways:
- The AACE annual meeting will take place Thursday through Saturday at the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans.
- This year’s keynote and plenary lectures will focus on AI, new technology and updated clinical guidance.
Looking to the future will be a key theme at the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology 2024 annual meeting with a keynote lecture focused on AI and sessions examining guidance updates and new technology.
This year’s AACE annual meeting will take place from Thursday to Saturday at the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans. The meeting will feature a wide range of sessions, including a keynote address with two speakers, three plenary talks and dozens of educational sessions and oral abstract and poster presentations. The meeting will also provide plenty of opportunities for networking, something Archana R. Sadhu, MD, FACE, program chair for the 2024 AACE annual meeting, system director for the diabetes program and director of transplant endocrinology at Houston Methodist Hospital, associate professor of clinical medicine at Houston Methodist Academic Institute, assistant clinical professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and adjunct assistant professor at Texas A&M Health Sciences, said is a major strength of the meeting.
“A great thing about AACE is we are smaller, more intimate and more family-like,” Sadhu told Healio. “Our meeting is all in one place, so it makes it easy to meet with people, head out into the city, do activities together and then come back for the program. It all flows very nicely.”
The keynote address, scheduled for Thursday at 3 p.m. CDT, is one of the highlights of this year’s event. This year’s keynote will include two speakers who will discuss the intersection of maintaining empathy while navigating technology and AI in delivering clinical care. Helen Riess, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and chief medical officer at Harvard Medical School, will discuss the importance of empathy when interacting with patients. Dereck Paul, MD, co-founder and CEO of Glass Health, will talk about the advantages of utilizing AI to allow for a greater focus on empathetic interactions between providers and patients.
“AI is not something we should fear and avoid, but actually employ to make clinical practice more effective and easier for us,” Sadhu said. “We should use empathy and AI to their best ability in our daily patient care.”
Several popular session formats from past years will return in 2024, including case-based conversations, where a presenter will discuss a case study and attendees will learn about how to work through the scenario, and the AACE talk show, where multiple speakers will present about a topic and engage in a panel discussion.
A new session format debuting this year is a point-counterpoint debate to address controversial topics. In the first debate, scheduled for Thursday at 1:45 p.m. CDT, presenters will discuss the use of bariatric surgery compared with obesity medications. The second debate, scheduled for Saturday at 9:30 a.m. CDT, will examine the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists and SGLT2 inhibitors for people with type 1 diabetes.
“These are topics we run across daily in clinical practice,” Sadhu said. “This is something we thought attendees would benefit greatly from, having a deep-dive discussion and asking the questions that go through their minds day in and day out when treating patients.”
Another new feature at this year’s meeting is the patient journey activation station. Located outside the Learning Zone, the area will feature patient journeys with managing thyroid disease, obesity and diabetes technology that were created using AACE clinical practice guidelines. All of the journeys were reviewed by patient advocacy organizations and can also be viewed at https://pro.aace.com/.
This year’s meeting features three plenary talks, including:
- On Thursday at 9:15 a.m. CDT, Guillermo Umpierrez, MD, will be the speaker in the Alan J. Garber, MD, PhD, MACE, Lectureship for the Prevention and Management of the Complications of Diabetes. Umpierrez will be discussing updates to clinical practice guidance for management of hyperglycemic crises in adults with diabetes.
- The speaker in the Hossein Gharib, MD, Educational Lectureship will be Jennifer Sipos, MD, professor of medicine at Ohio State University. Sipos will discuss the past, present and future of thyroid ultrasound Friday at 9 a.m. CDT.
- The Kahn-Tan Faiman Frontiers in Science and Endocrinology Award will be presented Friday at 1:15 p.m. CDT to Margaret E. Wierman, MD, professor in medicine, integrative physiology and OB/GYN at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Wierman’s talk will discuss adrenocortical cancer and the process of going from the patient to the bench and then back again.
The meeting will also feature two hands-on skills workshops for diabetes technology and thyroid ultrasound. Attendees will be taught by expert faculty in small groups with the technology on site for hands-on learning.
Attendees will have plenty of opportunities to network and interact with colleagues throughout the meeting. Some meet-up events include the meeting’s welcome block party Thursday at 4:30 p.m. CDT, an international meet-up for attendees from outside the U.S. on Friday at 2:30 p.m. CDT and the president’s party Friday at 7 p.m. CDT.
“We have several networking opportunities for our attendees,” Sadhu said. “That’s really important to AACE, to make sure that everyone not only has educational enrichment, but professional and social fulfillment with the attendance experience.”
Healio will provide coverage live from AACE 2024, including reports on the sessions, on-site video interviews and more. For more information on the AACE agenda and registration, visit https://pro.aace.com/events/2024/annual-meeting.
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