Medical meeting professionals flocked to a closed-door session at the end of the Professional Convention Management Association’s Convening Leaders annual conference, held January 8–11 in San Diego. It was their opportunity to talk with peers about their biggest challenges, and what they are doing to resolve them.

Here's what they had to say about the costs of complying with government regulations and Accreditation Council for CME rules, pressures to find new sources of revenue, building traffic to the exhibition floor, and maximizing sponsorship dollars.

During a session at the Professional Convention Management Association’s annual conference, Convening Leaders, held in San Diego earlier this month, CEOs from three U.S. medical societies said that healthcare reform is a major challenge to their physician members.

Here are more of their perspectives on the need for increased transparency around physician/industry interactions, globalization, virtual meetings, and other hot topics.

A lot of industry conferences talk about overall business and economic trends, but how often do they drill down to just what those trends mean specifically for medical meetings? At the 8th Annual Pharmaceutical Meeting Managers Forum, to be held for the first time in Orlando March 25-28, you’ll hear keynoter Francois Nader, MD, president and CEO of NPS Pharmaceuticals, talk about recent changes in the life sciences industry, including changing regulatory requirements and compliance issues, the mergers and acquisitions that continue to rock the business, and new technology platforms.

To bring home what it all means for those in the trenches, co-sponsors Medical Meetings and The Center for Business Intelligence corralled a stellar group of pharmaceutical meeting professionals to talk about how these trends are playing out in how they conduct their meetings. They’ll talk frankly about the ever-evolving role of meeting managers, and what you need to know about the overarching trends to stay at the top of your game with your company.

Learn more or register for the conference here.

Dr. BJ Fogg, founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and author of Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, has made creating systems designed to change behavior his life’s work. So who better to ask about what continuing medical education providers can do to facilitate change in their healthcare professional learners that results in better patient care?

Here are three things Fogg says can help you help your learners change for the better.

I’m getting ready to put my YakTrax on ice (figuratively—I’ve been doing that literally a little too often lately) and head South to Orlando this weekend for the annual conference of the organization that used to be known as the Alliance for Continuing Medical Education. The organization has gone through a lot of changes since last year’s conference, and I’m excited to see where it plans to go from here. But mostly I’m looking forward to seeing people I haven’t seen for the past year, meeting new people, stuffing my brain so full it hurts, and hopefully being able to share at least some of what the experience is like on the Capsules blog and on the #acehp12 Twitter hashtag.

As always, though, I find myself cutting it awfully close when it comes to preparing for the conference (as in, I have yet to crack the abstract list, much less make a detailed list of must-attend sessions, much less try to schedule time with people I want to sit down with, much less, well, you get my drift). How do you prepare to get the most of the Alliance conference, or any other meeting for that matter?

Derek Warnick, who until recently was CME director with Curatio CME Institute, wrote a great blog post outlining his top conference-prep tips. This also was the topic of a fun conversation on Wednesday on the Twitter #CMEChat hashtag. Here are some of my top takeaways from that discussion—feel free to add your suggestions to the pile.

I hope to see you in Orlando!