Reflections on ACR Convergence 2020: What we learned
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2020 has been some kind of year for all of us, entirely viewed and experienced through the lens of COVID-19.
While the impact of the pandemic has been first and foremost intensely personal, it has also been profoundly social and professional. I am still taking in and enjoying ACR Convergence 2020 online and thought I would capture a few thoughts on what we may have gained and lost in experiencing a new format of meeting.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we were all more or less reluctant to enter the virtual world — or, should I say, substitute the virtual world for our “real world” — but most of us have quickly adapted. My biomarker for this has been the witnessed capacity of some of my oldest and most Luddite patients to get on board for virtual visits. We too have been transformed from initially being both inexperienced and annoyed at having Zoom meetings to now having become experienced critics of the various and expanding virtual platforms we use on a daily basis.
I have found myself having developed a number of virtual friendships with some colleagues with whom I have worked on an ongoing international project over the past 6 months where none of us have ever met in person. My reflection is that this is a far better substitute for emails and phone calls, but not a substitute for mano e mano interactions. More on that later.
ACR — unlike EULAR, who thought they would be putting on a live meeting and valiantly switched late in the game — planned virtual early on. Overall, I give this four and a half stars (out of five) and can’t begin to express my gratitude to the organizers, planners and workers who made this happen.
The big winner was the platform. It was visually lush, easy to traverse (although, I thought the search engine could have been better for abstracts), and aside from some minor glitches during some sessions, technically sound. I loved the posters: The 2-minute summaries are just great, and I hope they stay forever, even when live meetings resume in whatever form they will assume. In fact, I would love to be able to view these the week before the meeting and then use the live conference primarily for networking with the authors.
Similarly, the shorter plenary sessions with easily downloadable presentations are great and I am still working my way through these, even as I write this in early December. Why haven’t we always had such access? Why make it two separate platforms, ie, a live meeting and a repurposed meeting? It should forever be a fused meeting.
What have we lost? There is no spoiler alert here, particularly for those of us who regularly patronize ACR live meetings — this would have been my 40th consecutive live meeting, by the way! — we missed being with our friends and colleagues. For me, this existential loss ranged from seeing old fellows, to collaborators, to dear and special friends with whom something special is always planned. To the credit of ACR Convergence, the meeting went to extraordinary lengths to bridge this loss with the Community Hub, the Social Wall and the notes during talks, the Twitter Ambassadors, all of which were great.
As for what was lost, let me paraphrase the brilliant writer Jonathan Safran Foer who, in his 2013 New York Times opinion piece, reminded us that all these electronic advances — from the lowly and unhip VM and fax to emails, texts and social media platforms — “were not created to be improvements on face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.” He has also reflected on our vulnerability to actually coming to prefer these forms of communications over the real or human ones because of their ease. This may very well be a watershed moment for live meetings in general and ACR in particular, as with each generation of newly minted rheumatologists, it will become harder to imagine future meetings that resemble what we are all familiar with.
Lastly, I found it particularly ironic that this year I was privileged to give a major talk on the “Science of Empathy in Rheumatology,” in which I emphasize the importance of human touch and reading the facial expressions of our patients at a moment in time where faces are covered and we are socially distancing. Indeed, virtual is no substitute for personal but it has given us some things that we should keep and an opportunity for reflection. I am so much looking forward to seeing all my rheum friends again, sooner hopefully than later.
What were your thoughts on ACR Convergence? Please share your own reflections with me through Twitter at @LCalabreseDO or email me at calabrl@ccf.org.
- For more information:
- Leonard H. Calabrese, DO, is the Chief Medical Editor, Healio Rheumatology, and Professor of Medicine, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, and RJ Fasenmyer Chair of Clinical Immunology at the Cleveland Clinic.
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