Excitement and Anticipation Surround the 2023 AACC Annual Scientific Meeting

What’s it like to spend more than a year planning a scientific meeting for 20,000 people, and then be on the precipice of all that work being realized? “Exciting,” said Amy Saenger, PhD, DABCC, FAACC, chair of AACC’s 12-member volunteer Annual Meeting Organizing Committee (AMOC). She expressed her anticipation as the meeting is set to return to pre-COVID-19 attendance numbers for the first time in years.

CLN spoke to her about the process of planning this year’s meeting and what attendees should expect.

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO THE MOST ABOUT THIS YEAR’S MEETING?
I’m mostly looking forward to having it be more like a normal meeting again, with almost everything in person. We expect attendance numbers to be back to or exceeding where they were prepandemic. I think we’re all looking forward to just getting back to ‘normal.’”

At the same time, we’re also offering virtual options for some of our sessions. We’ve improved the delivery of virtual content to ensure attendees can access the information they need. While our aim is to have people attend in person, we acknowledge that it may not work for everyone, so we want to ensure they have the opportunity to participate.

HOW HAVE CHANGES IN LAB MEDICINE AFFECTED THE CONTENT OF THE MEETING?
We've taken a targeted approach and conducted extensive outreach for our sessions, which has been incredibly successful. The content now showcases more innovative approaches to lab medicine, expanding beyond the traditional laboratory setting. For example, during the pandemic, clinical laboratories adapted their testing methods to serve homeless shelters, correctional facilities, and long-term care facilities. We’ll have sessions exploring these novel approaches and a broader focus on population health.

Clinical laboratorians have a lot of exciting things to share. We’re going to see a lot of cutting-edge science that’s coming out of lab medicine and clinical chemistry.

WHAT ELSE CAN ATTENDEES EXPECT THIS YEAR?
For this meeting, we’ve made a lot of changes to the format of the program that the AMOC is enthusiastic about. For example, we opened the poster sessions to all attendees, whether they’re expo only attendees or full conference attendees. We did that because we’re trying to increase the visibility of the posters and abstract presentations for everybody. It’s a good and significant change.

We also changed the topics of the posters and the abstracts to better align with our AACC divisions, and we are hoping to increase attendance there. If divisions decide to do poster walks again, they can more easily do so. This is a return to how we did things a few years ago, and we realized this worked well, so we made the change.

We also were able to work with the AACC’s journal Clinical Chemistry so that all our abstracts are indexed in the journal. I believe this also will boost visibility for all our authors, who put a lot of time and effort into doing these studies and presenting them.

Overall, attendees can expect to see a lot of excellent cutting-edge science and research in the field of laboratory medicine, and they should expect to have a lot of fruitful discussions and collaborations with their colleagues and other professionals in the field.