Neurosurgeons going paperless at convention

PHILADELPHIA — As Michael Oh watched his daughter easily navigate her iPod touch, he had an epiphany.

“I figured if she can learn it so intuitively that
neurosurgeons would be able to figure it out,” said Oh, who is a
neurosurgeon.

He’ll find out whether he was right when 3,500 neurosurgeons meet in Philadelphia in May for what he believes is the nation’s first paperless scientific or medical convention.

When they register at the American Association of Neurological Surgeons
meeting, the doctors will be given iPod touches already loaded with
everything they’ll need, including the program (165 pages last year),
summaries of research presented at the meeting, advertising and
information from exhibitors. Doctors will be able to use the iPods for
messaging and for interacting with presenters during meetings. The
convention also attracts 3,500 exhibitors and guests who will not be
given the devices.

Not only will the iPods encourage community
building, but they will save a lot of paper, said Oh, who heads a
convention committee on the machines. The programs alone would have
used more than half a million pages, he said, and most of those would
have been left behind in hotel rooms.

“I think we will transform and really revolutionize how medical and scientific meetings are conducted,” said Oh, who works at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh
and already has an impressive tech track record. He helped develop a
brain-surgery simulator that was a hit at previous meetings.

After watching his daughter, Oh discovered he was not the first to see the iPod’s potential. The Canadian Film and Television Production Association went paperless at its meeting last year and plans to do it again next month. Conventiongoers can reuse their iPods.

Oh went to the 2009 film meeting to see how the
technology would work. The neurosurgeons are a bigger group with more
complex printing needs, but he thought they could do this, too. “The
time is right to make this change,” he said. His fellow doctors, most
of whom have PDAs, a handheld computer, embraced the idea.

AANS bought the iPod touches and added $100
to the registration fee. Apple will have people from its local stores
on hand to answer questions, and members of the young neurosurgeons
committee will help, too. Oh, who is 41, said that’s young for
neurosurgeons, who typically train into their mid-30s.

Convention experts say the trend toward greener
behavior at meetings is taking hold, but the neurosurgeons are going
farther than most.

“It’s quite rare, but the march is on,” said Brad Lewis, spokesman for the Professional Convention Management Association.
He said session evaluations and handouts were virtually all online now.
His own organization at its recent convention offered to download the
program to PDAs. He does not know how many people attending did so, but
the uptake for new technology is usually only about 20 percent the
first year. People who still wanted paper got four small daily guides
instead of a program, which ran 67 pages last year.

Pat Schaumann, president of Meeting IQ in St. Louis,
said that devices offered many advantages but that there were some
potential problems. They are expensive, and many conventions attract
people from four generations, not all of whom are tech savvy. The small
screens can also be difficult for people with vision problems.

Joanne Hulme, owner of Tents Party Rentals & Planners in Pottstown, Pa.,
said the recession had slowed some customers’ ability to go green. And
not every group is ready to do everything electronically.

“No paper’s great as long as 100 percent of your
people are ready to go,” she said. “Not everybody has BlackBerrys. Not
everybody brings laptops with them.”

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