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Healio to report live from ACG 2019
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SAN ANTONIO — Starting this weekend, Healio Gastroenterology and Liver Disease will provide live coverage as the exclusive media partner of the American College of Gastroenterology’s 84th Annual Scientific Meeting.
The conference is led by current ACG President Sunanda V. Kane, MD, MSPH, FACG, and features a comprehensive program that highlights the latest clinical information and future trends in gastroenterology, hepatology and endoscopy.
“I like to think of the annual meeting into two separate parts,” Kane, who is also a gastroenterologist and Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told Healio Gastroenterology and Liver Disease. “The first part is the Friday and weekend portion of the meeting. Friday involves the practice management courses, which is now titled ‘Roadmap for a Successful Community or Academic GI Practice Course - Ramp-Up Your Practice, Super-Charge Your Staff.’ We changed the name of the course so that it is not just geared toward a practice manager, but also to gastroenterologists who practice in academic centers.”
More than 5,000 gastroenterologists are expected to attend the annual meeting and, according to Kane, this year saw the most poster abstracts submitted for presentation – 3,000.
“We had a record number of submissions for the posters this year,” Kane said in an interview. “There are some really fabulous Presidential posters that just missed the mark to be included as an oral presentation.”
Research highlights
Important highlights among this year’s scientific presentations include topics like functional bowel disease, eosinophilic esophagitis, and research in Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, according to Seth A. Gross, MD, FACG, chair of the ACG Educational Affairs Committee.
“When abstracts are submitted every year, we don’t exactly know what people are going to submit,” Gross, who is also Chief of Gastroenterology at Tisch Hospital, NYU Langone Medical Center, and Associate Professor of Medicine at NYU School of Medicine, told Healio Gastroenterology and Liver Disease. “This year, we have some research involving IBD, but we’re also going to see research that shows how gastroenterology has become subspecialized. There are a lot of important areas of clinical investigation that are going on in addition to areas that we might see all the time.”
Additionally, Kane highlighted the presidential plenary on Monday, October 28.
“There is going to be some really innovative science in the areas of eosinophilic esophagitis, inflammatory bowel disease and other aspects of gastrointestinal care that don’t always get enough attention [during the plenary],” Kane said.
New this year
One of the new things that attendees should look for, according to Gross, is the hands-on workshop and a new challenge.
Each year, the ACG hosts a GI Jeopardy, which tests cognitive skills of trainees. However, this year, there will be a new challenge to test the technical skills of trainees.
The challenge, known as EndoTitans, will include multiple endoscopy-related tasks that second and third year fellows will need to complete.
The challenge will take place on Sunday, October 27 from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm CDT in the Exhibit Hall. The participants will receive a recognition plaque at the end of the challenge.
“We’re just building on the successes of the past where we might change some of the formats of the symposium where we have debate format vs. straight lectures which we think will be interesting to attendees to hear hot topics being debated by experts on opposite sides of the clinical management of the disease,” Gross said.
Healio Gastroenterology and Liver Disease staff will report live on breaking news presented at the meeting and capture video interviews with experts to gain their perspectives on important presentations. Visit and follow @HealioGastro on Twitter for the latest news emerging from #ACG2019.