Excellence in Communications via a Live Event or Stand-Alone Activity

Summary of work

Crohn’s disease– a chronic, debilitating and progressive disease – is on the increase worldwide; but remission rates remain disappointing. New strategies are needed to optimise outcomes; one such strategy is treat-to-target (T2T). A UK Steering Committee of Gastroenterology KOLs looked to develop an agenda to provide meaningful, practical education on T2T. Pre-meeting only 45% respondents believed that T2T improved patient outcomes with 73% respondents rating their understanding of T2T in practice as below average. Through state-of-the-art technology, the meeting was live broadcast between four main sites with four additional satellite hubs to view the meeting live one-way. This secured a broader range of faculty including local speakers to tailor each meeting to the local needs whilst maintaining a National KOL lead faculty with the unity and credibility of a ’stand-alone event’. The meeting exceeded its objectives with over 370 registered delegates; 79% of delegates post-meeting believing that T2T optimises patient outcomes (an increase of 33%), and 71% of respondents feeling confident implementing T2T (an increase of 44%). A post-meeting programme extended the reach of the programme with over 300 registrations for the T2T webinar series; implementation of T2T was demonstrated through development of 12 new UK T2T pathways.

Judges' comments

This is the level all meetings of this type should be aspiring to. Everything is connected from the insights through to the measures and outputs. It shows real evidence of change backed by a highly innovative use of technology to achieve engagement of a critical mass of target audience. Most importantly, this brave meeting brought about a direct clinical achievement. We were blown away.