ACI 2022
Millbrook Medical Conferences made ACI a meeting to remember, offering gamification and a wealth of opportunities to participate through a dedicated app and education dome.
The British Cardiovascular Intervention Society (BCIS) returned to the London Hilton Metropole for its annual three-day conference Advanced Cardiovascular Intervention (ACI). Millbrook Medical Conferences (Millbrook) made ACI a meeting to remember, offering gamification and a wealth of opportunities to participate through a dedicated app and education dome. ACI featured 30 sessions comprising over 80 presentations, educating over 900 delegates.
Spanning across three days, BCIS’s flagship conference attracts approx. 900 attendees, with the majority attending the full three-day programme. It aims to bring interventional cardiologists across the nation together.
Millbrook’s involvement since 2004 has been integral to the growth of this conference from restyling the exhibition and thus increasing sponsorship significantly, reworking branding and design and improving communications across the board. With Millbrook’s input, new education platforms such as live case transmissions, simulator demonstrations and interactive patient case discussion groups have been introduced. Furthermore, Millbrook provides delegate and faculty logistical support for ACI.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, ACI 2021 was held online. With COVID-19 restrictions lifted, ACI was given the green light to go ahead in springtime 2022. With ACI making a comeback in-person, Millbrook needed to deliver a memorable wow factor.
ACI aims to update cardiologists and healthcare professionals working in the field on all aspects of interventional cardiology through didactic state-of-the-art lectures, interactive angio review sessions and live cases.
Millbrook facilitated 30 sessions comprising 89 presentations. The conference space comprised of a main auditorium seating 900 delegates, where all presentations, live cases, debates and panel discussions took place. Other conference spaces housed breakout sessions where several sessions and meetings took place at any one time.
Two patient cases were transmitted live from hospitals in Scotland and Wales enabling real-time discussion and interaction with complex interventional cardiology procedures. In addition, two pre-recorded cases were shown during the conference.
An exhibition hall showcased 33 industry-sponsored booths. Six levels of sponsorship were available alongside extra sponsorship opportunities across other areas of the conference, securing additional funding and adding value to sponsors through increased visibility and more opportunity to receive return on their investment.
The conference included a dinner on the second evening seating 250 delegates in the main lecture hall.
Millbrook created, managed and populated a conference app which enabled live polling during debate sessions, shared programme information, and a treasure hunt game. The treasure hunt game involved delegates answering questions from across the conference to generate points, which added a sense of competition as a free BCIS membership for the following year was offered up as a prize. The app also provided evaluation forms for CPD certificates as well as sharing delegate, faulty and sponsor information to aid networking.
New for 2022, Millbrook thought up and implemented an Education Dome into the exhibition hall at ACI. An intimate venue, the inflatable dome seated 35 delegates and showcased industry-sponsored mini-talks during breaks and lunchtime, so that it did not distract people from the main meeting room, and, more importantly, the education. The dome was a hit with industry and delegates alike and aided in providing new opportunities for sponsors to showcase new devices and data, where they were unable to previously.
Returning as a face-to-face conference after COVID-19, ACI 2022 was a real success. The attendee feedback highlighted a thirst for in person meetings and networking. ACI 2022 received high praise for the range of topics covered, format and speaker line up. The survey for ACI 2022 was completed by 347 people.
The results show:
Commenting on the best part of ACI 2022, one delegate said: “Seeing everyone face to face and having very high-quality educational content.” Whilst another commented: “Meeting with colleagues and getting up to date with trials and practice. As always case presentations/angio reviews were excellent. Peter Ludman exceptional. Thanks to everyone involved.”
After a year of being virtual, ACI 2022 did not disappoint; a regular attendee shared the following feedback: “This is my 10th ACI meeting. Topics and speakers always real world, great collegiality and organisation. Good cases.”
A Twitter campaign for the conference resulted in 2.45 million impressions from over 1,000 tweets by 381 participants. See some Tweets from conference delegates:
“I remember the days of a half-empty main auditorium in years gone by. It’s a testament to the tireless work of @BCIS_uk Council, Adrian Banning, Simon Redwood & @MillbrookMed to bring the UK interventional community together in such numbers.”
Another Twitter user said “Fantastic #ACI2022 meeting. Enjoying every session! The app is great, current schedule and ability to submit feedback for CPD immediately -just brilliant. Congratulations to the Programme Committee, @BCIS, @MillbrookMed, @NickCurzen, @clare_12, and colleagues.”
For those unable to attend in-person, ACI was recorded and is now available to watch under the ‘On-Demand Education’ section of the BCIS website.