番茄社区

SAN FRANCISCO -- Welcome to medical meeting 2.0, where the program is delivered via "App" displayed on Samsung tablets that come with the price of admission -- it's TCT 2013.

Organizers deployed roughly 9,000 metal and non-absorbable polymer Samsung tablets to registrants at to prevent "interactivity stenosis and paper embolisms" a thrombus caused by an estimated 15 tons of leftover paper generated at previous meetings, conference staff told 番茄社区.

Attendees who paid $1,745 for the full TCT week -- a hike of only about $100 over last year's registration price tag -- received the tablet as part of their registration, and received a letter to that effect to demonstrate that the tablet was not a gift from industry, which would be reportable under the Sunshine Act.

Press and part time attendees could borrow tablets, or pay $250 to buy one.

Overall, attendance dipped from 11,648 in 2012 to an estimated 11,489 people in 2013.

Conference staff preloaded the , developed by , which produced event apps used by tech conference behemoth, South by Southwest.

Staff also tailored bandwidth access on tablets in order to optimize Wi-Fi connectivity, said Ajay Kirtane, MD, co-director of the conference.

Innovation is never easy and the "great tablet experiment" had a handful of complications ranging from disappearing CME credits to mystery sessions in which the room number was omitted from the program listing, making it almost impossible to locate sessions in the cavernous Mascone Convention Center.

Guaranteed slide downloads were also problematic as slides promised for immediately following sessions were not available for download until the following day.

Still, many doctors said they found the agenda feature useful for planning their schedule each day. Another popular feature among attendees was a live chat room for each session. "We worked hard to make this an effective educational tool for people," Kirtane said. "Some people have joked that they didn't know what to pay [more] attention to, the speaker or the app."

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