Healthcare Conferences: Why the Engaged Patient Matters
22 Sep 2017
With healthcare conferences becoming increasingly inclusive, new questions arise about the importance of the patient. Should patients be involved in healthcare conferences? Or should the conferences be restricted solely to professionals in the field?
Through a study conducted by Symplur, new findings showed patients have a higher level of social media engagement than that of healthcare professionals in the field, which may change how healthcare conference organizers develop their attendance guidelines.
The study concluded: “Healthcare conferences that fail to engage patients in their proceedings as meaningful participants may risk limiting their engagement with the public, disseminating science output to a narrow community and slowing flow of information across social media channels, to the detriment of their academic missions.”
More than 2,200 conferences registered hashtags with Symplur during 2016, and those numbers are expected to be higher this year. The findings from this study hope to help patients make the case for their inclusion, even at highly specialized events with limited budgets. Organizers, presenters and sponsors should all have shared goals around engagement, and promoting patient voice would be an efficient way of achieving this.
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