Enhancing Expert Panel Discussions in Pediatric Palliative Care: Innovative Scenario Development and Summarization With ChatGPT-4

This study presents a novel approach to enhance expert panel discussions in a medical conference through the use of ChatGPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer version 4), a recently launched powerful artificial intelligence (AI) language model. We report on ChatGPT-4's ability to optimize and summarize the medical conference panel recommendations of the first Pan-Arab Pediatric Palliative Critical Care Hybrid Conference, held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. ChatGPT-4 was incorporated into the discussions in two sequential phases: first, scenarios were optimized by the AI model to stimulate in-depth conversations; second, the model identified, summarized, and contrasted key themes from the panel and audience discussions. The results suggest that ChatGPT-4 effectively facilitated complex do-not-resuscitate (DNR) conflict resolution by summarizing key themes such as effective communication, collaboration, patient and family-centered care, trust, and ethical considerations. The inclusion of ChatGPT-4 in pediatric palliative care panel discussions demonstrated potential benefits for enhancing critical thinking among medical professionals. Further research is warranted to validate and broaden these insights across various settings and cultures.

The Extended Congress: Reimagining scientific meetings after the COVID-19 pandemic

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted the medical meetings planned for 2020. This health crisis has caused the cancellation, postponement or a pivot in educational design to virtual formats. In the latter case, the format for virtual meetings has remained very similar to the cancelled face-to-face meeting, by using primarily web conferencing systems. This article intends to start a dialogue with the medical education and events community about possible delivery formats. Among them, the concept of an "Extended Congress" is introduced. The extended congress uses the extension of time, space and languages to a scientific meeting. It aims to: 1) unleash the reach of traditional meetings through the use of technology to access larger audiences in different languages, across a country and internationally, with local leaders to help interpret the knowledge and localize it, and 2) to improve knowledge translation into practice through a sequential and active learning process. An ongoing example is described as a proof of concept: the Latin American Peritoneal Dialysis Extended Congress attracted 774 remote participants from over 20 countries, 93% of whom were paid registrants. Initially designed as a hybrid (live plus remote) event scheduled for March 2020, it had to be reframed as a remote only meeting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, thus protecting the health of members while providing continued value to the organization and attendees of the event. With this experience in mind, the authors are currently designing programs in the United States, through collaboration with the University of Virginia Office of Continuing Medical Education. In summary, the design of meetings can better utilize and integrate technology and reach larger audiences with a blend of formats. Those organizations that adapt more quickly to offer these events will concentrate more of the share, as seen with the adoption of technology by other industries.

Reporting of conflicts of interest in oral presentations at medical conferences: a delegate-based prospective observational study

OBJECTIVE

To assess the prevalence, location, presentation and consistency of conflict of interest statements in oral presentations at medical conferences DESIGN: Prospective, delegate-based observational study SAMPLE: 201 oral presentations at 5 medical conferences in 2016 MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Presence of a conflict of interest statement, its location within the presentation and its duration of display. Concordance between conflict of interest disclosures in oral presentations and written abstracts or meeting speaker information RESULTS: Conflict of interest statements were present in 143/201 (71%) presentations (range for conferences 26%-100%). 118 of the 141 evaluable statements (84%) were reported on a specific slide. Slides containing conflict of interest statements were displayed for a median (IQR) 2 s (1-5), range for conferences 1.25-7.5 s. Duration of display was shorter when the slide contained only the conflict of interest statement, 2 s (1-3.5), than when it contained other information, 8 s (3-17), but was not affected by type of presentation or whether a conflict of interest was disclosed. When a conflict of interest was disclosed, 27/84 (32%) presenters discussed an aspect of it. Discordance between the presence of a conflict of interest disclosure in the oral presentation and written formats occurred for 22% of presentations.

CONCLUSION

In oral presentations at the medical conferences we assessed, conflict of interest statements were often missing, displayed too briefly to be read and understood, or not discussed/explained by the presenter. They were sometimes discordant with statements in the corresponding written formats. Conference delegates' ability to assess the objectivity and quality of the information in oral presentations may therefore have been diminished.

Use of Twitter Polls to Determine Public Opinion Regarding Content Presented at a Major National Specialty Society Meeting

PURPOSE

The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of using Twitter polls to assess public opinion regarding session content at a national specialty society meeting.

METHODS

Twitter polls allow users to embed multiple-choice questions within tweets and automatically aggregate responses. Two radiologists attending the 2016 annual meeting of the ACR posted a Twitter poll containing the hashtag #ACR2016 during 10 meeting sessions addressing socioeconomics/advocacy, patient experience, and social media/informatics (20 polls total). Each poll contained a question asking for an opinion regarding the session's content. Polls were open for responses for 24 hours.

RESULTS

The average number of responses per poll was significantly higher for the user with the larger number of Twitter followers (24.3 ± 14.4 versus 11.2 ± 9.8, P = .015). A total of 57% of respondents agreed that radiologists' payments should shift to value-based payments, and 86% agreed that radiologists should routinely survey their patients to monitor quality; however, 83% disagreed with basing physician payments on patient satisfaction scores. A total of 85% disagreed that the artificial intelligence supercomputer Watson will entirely replace radiologists. A total of 76% agreed that social media can drive business at less cost than standard marketing. A total of 56% agreed with the direction of the ACR's advocacy and regulatory efforts, whereas 74% considered the ACR's advocacy efforts to be moderately or very useful for their practice. A total of 50% planned to change their practice on the basis of keynote remarks by Dr Ezekiel Emanuel.

CONCLUSIONS

Twitter polls provide a free and easy infrastructure to potentially capture global public sentiment during the course of a medical society meeting. Their use may enrich and promote discussions of key session content.

First Virtual Live Conference in Healthcare

BACKGROUND

Conferences and meetings bring together thousands of doctors from diverse locations. However, the traveling, accommodation, and arrangement of venues for conferences and meetings are expensive and a lot of time needs to be devoted to these logistics. The purpose of this article was to present our own virtual live conference experience using web conferencing and to briefly outline the basics and advantages of this technology in organization of healthcare conferences.

METHODS

Web conferencing technology was used to organize an international bariatric surgery conference, allowing a large number of attendees to participate and interact from wherever they were, using merely an Internet connection with a video player on their personal computers, laptops, or smartphones.

RESULTS

A virtual live conference saves a lot of time and cost and simplifies the logistics needed to organize a learning conference with worldwide participation.

CONCLUSION

As far as we know, this is the first report of a virtual live conference in healthcare. We see it as the future of organizing experts as well as medical teaching conferences.

Poster presentations at medical conferences: an effective way of disseminating research?

This study aimed to ascertain the value of posters at medical meetings to presenters and delegates. The usefulness of posters to presenters at national and international meetings was evaluated by assessing the numbers of delegates visiting them and the reasons why they visited. Memorability of selected posters was assessed and factors influencing their appeal to expert delegates identified. At both the national and international meetings, very few delegates (< 5%) visited posters. Only a minority read them and fewer asked useful questions. Recall of content was so poor that it prevented identification of factors improving their memorability. Factors increasing posters' visual appeal included their scientific content, pictures/graphs and limited use of words. Few delegates visit posters and those doing so recall little of their content. To engage their audience, researchers should design visually appealing posters by presenting high quality data in pictures or graphs without an excess of words.