Going Virtual Amid a Pandemic: Perspectives on a Web-Based Hospital Medicine Conference

In 2018, pediatric hospitalists at several New England institutions established a regional pediatric hospital medicine conference to facilitate collaboration and communication of advances in the field of pediatric hospital medicine. Planning committee members were recruited from pediatric hospital medicine programs from all six New England states, including multiple community sites, to ensure adequate representation and breadth of impact. The first conference was held in person in June 2019 in Boston, Massachusetts, and contained a full day of original content, including several concurrent lectures and workshops, a keynote address, a poster session, and a clinicopathological conference sponsored by Massachusetts General Hospital. Supported by favorable feedback from >100 attendees of the first conference, the planning committee decided to establish the New England Pediatric Hospital Medicine (NEPHM) conference thereafter as an annual event. While we were planning the NEPHM 2020 conference, the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) became a global pandemic. After surveying members of the planning committee and the conference speakers, we elected to change the format of the conference to an entirely Web-based platform.

Various forms of virtual delivery have been successfully used in health care^1,2 and medical education.³ Although there is some precedent for online health care conferences,⁴ organizing an entirely virtual forum was a novel and unfamiliar process for the planning committee. We describe here our experience with this transition and the challenges and opportunities it presented, including feedback from participants and presenters.