In-person interactions may be most important element missing from virtual meetings
After a normal week seeing patients and doing surgery March 9 to 13, we ophthalmologists in Minnesota were told to close our offices and ASCs to emergencies only effective Monday, March 16.
With COVID-19 precautions, including screening for symptoms, exposure or fever before entry into the office or ASC, mask wearing for all patients and employees, social distancing in the office and ASC with the parking lot serving as an extended waiting room, and extensive facility cleaning between patients, months later we are back at work with no limitation on who can be seen and treated. Ophthalmology was the specialty most negatively affected by COVID-19 in the U.S., down 81% overall and 96% for our critically important cataract surgery patients in April.
The good news is that our specialty is bouncing back rapidly, and after setting the record for reduction in patients seen and revenues generated in April, I predict we will set the record for fastest recovery in June and be very busy through the summer. Unfortunately, the same is not true for our specialty and subspecialty societies and their meetings.
I participated in several well-attended successful ophthalmology meetings in January and February, including Hawaiian Eye 2020 in Koloa, Hawaii, Telling It Like It Is in Orlando and Caribbean Eye in Cancun. Then it ended. Since returning to Minneapolis from a board meeting in California on March 6, I have traveled nowhere. All my board of director, medical advisory board and educational meetings have either been canceled or converted to virtual formats. These include meetings as small as 10 people to as large as 10,000 participants. To name a few, there was no American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery spring meeting, no Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology meeting, no Kiawah Eye meeting and no American-European Congress of Ophthalmic Surgery meeting.
I expected things to start opening up in July, and I am traveling from Minneapolis to Orange County, California, for an in-person board meeting that month, but ophthalmology meetings just keep canceling. There will be no ASCRS Summer Symposium in Austin, Texas, in August and no European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons meeting in Amsterdam in October. Healio/OSN/Vindico are still planning to hold Kiawah Eye 2020 in South Carolina Sept. 11 to 13. That meeting, if it occurs, will be my first in-person on-site ophthalmology meeting since February, a drought of more than 6 months. OSN New York is still planned for Oct. 16 to 18, and Hawaiian Eye 2021 is a go for Jan. 16 to 22 in Maui. Our American Academy of Ophthalmology leadership has not fully confirmed the granddaddy of all, the fall AAO annual meeting, will take place in Las Vegas the second weekend in November, but I am planning that it will occur in a reduced format.
It appears that it is even harder to organize a safe and economically viable in-person ophthalmology meeting than it is to resume seeing patients in the COVID-19 environment. There are designs to create safe meeting set-ups with social distancing and masks, but occupancy in a room that would seat 200 is reduced to 50 to create a safe and legal setting. Exhibit halls, which are critical to an ophthalmology meeting’s financial success, are even more difficult to manage. No company wants to pay a large fee to be isolated and socially distanced in a small exhibit with little to no doctor traffic. A small, safe meeting can be designed with careful planning and attendee cooperation, but when the numbers are run by the potential sponsoring organization, nearly all such meetings are not economically viable. Even our most financially sound specialty societies and academies cannot afford to lose large sums of money sponsoring in-person meetings.
The alternative — useful but in my opinion not as productive, and certainly not as much fun — is the plethora of virtual meetings we are all now experiencing. Good education and knowledge transfer can take place, but the critical professional peer-to-peer and professional-to-industry interactions are absent.
I believe a few of the in-person meetings mentioned above will take place this fall, and if participants are comfortable with the ground transportation, air travel, hotel accommodations, restaurant and educational offerings, face-to-face meetings will show a slow increase in attendance into next year. If participants have a poor travel, accommodation, food, hospitality and meeting experience, we may have seen the end of large face-to-face single-site meetings as a core element of our education and peer-to-peer interaction. It is the loss of interactive peer-to-peer and physician-to-industry face-to-face discussions that I will miss the most, as they have benefited my patients and I more than any didactic session, book or journal.
I do not yet see a clear solution, although chat lines, blogs, partner discussions for group practices and maybe a surge in smaller local meetings may fill the gap to some extent. The ramifications of these changes are still uncertain, and as always, some organizations will be damaged, and others will thrive. Sadly, without a well-attended financially successful meeting, some of our most beloved organizations may find it difficult to survive.
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