There used to a be small record shop in my home town called Zhivago Records. It’s owner, Pat Pyne, stocked most of the stuff in the music charts, some ‘The Cure’ and ‘Led Zepellin’ T shirts, blank audio cassettes, and a ‘local interest’ section comprising (largely dodgy) Irish music for tourists. Although I sometimes found the limited selection of music available frustrating, choosing was easy and it largely satisfied my musical tastes at the time. Zhivago went out of business 2 years ago.
My first visit to Tower Records in London’s Picadilly Circus in the 80’s, opened my mind to a new world of musical posibilities that I didn’t even know existed. The 25,000 sq ft shop in Picadilly Circus housed what seemed to be an infinite collection of music and catered to every imaginable taste.
Although the having so much more music to choose from was exhilarating, I confess that I also found the the experience made me anxious (that I might miss THAT one special album or make a choice that was deeply unfashionable), frustrated (not knowing where to start looking or forget what it was I came into buy in the first place) and even a little hostile towards the knowledgeable (but sometimes patronising) shop assistants working within the genre subsections of the shop.
What should have been the ultimate shopping experience sometimes ended in my leaving rather overwhelmed and disappointed by the experience and feeling guilty that I didn’t make a purchase at all.
Despite years of growth and expansion, Tower records is now gone too. Like everyone else these days I buy all of my music online. Tower record’s once impressive calatogue is now dwarfed by what’s available from iTunes’ 20 million plus online song library.
What makes this iTunes so successful is not just the wide choice of music available, but the incredible sophistication of the filtering system that helps me choose what I want to buy. Using my previous purchase history, iTunes has worked out my musical tastes and from that presents similar kinds of music to me. When I choose a track for download, I get to see what other people who have purchased this music have also bought, exposing me to new music and thereby broadening my own musical tastes. It seems to know what I want, even before I realise it myself.
This week, I’m ‘shopping’ at EULAR in Berlin, one of the Megastore medical meetings for my specialty, for information. Information that I hope will improve the lives of my patients and my working day. Like the 15,000 other delegates who’ve travelled distances and who have taken time off work to attend, I will be presented with an impressive choice of hundreds of presentations and over 3000 cutting edge scientific abstracts to choose from.
The curators of the meeting have gone to some trouble to divide up the meeting in to specific disease ‘genres’ sections, have put together a number of ‘Whats Hot’ plenary sessions, summary sessions and even a searchable app.
And yet, I’m beginning to get a familiar feeling…
Lets just hope that I bring home something that I like.
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Enjoy being a Berliner and see what serendipity brings ur way…?
M
Ronan — I am not surprised by just how marvelously astute this post is – you are so often spot on in your vision of what is and what could be.
How medical associations construct annual meetings has changed little (for the better) in decades. Surely these meetings have shinier exhibits, and perhaps fewer pens and tchotchkes, and some have new itinerary planner apps to help navigate sessions, but the reality is that the greatest bulk of the content is simply thought of as content to stock the shelves of the convention center much like the team at Tower Records saw it as their role to stock the shelves of their stores.
This lack of an evolved content architecture and real support of lifelong learning means that attendees are on their own to make sense of everything that the association offers up. And once the meeting ends, attendees are on their own to archive and call upon the lessons they learned (remember?)… and attendees are often unaware of what lessons they missed, and unfamiliar with how to tie any of these lessons into practice.
iTunes is a pull model vs the push models of Zhivago Records or Tower Records – and medical associations and the medical education community in general have not explored ‘pull models’ at much depth…and this lack of ‘pull’ innovation continues to undermine the innovation of healthcare.
Simply put, more effort needs to be put into engineering learning solutions that provide content more flexibly and allows the learner to pull in what they need when they need it. I call this a ‘rapid learning system’ and in my opinion this is basically the opposite of the ‘stocking the shelves’ models that are in use by every major medical association (EULAR is certainly not alone in this shortcoming).
Any way, thanks for allowing me to add my two cents and lets keep an eye out for and recognize any organizations that are moving in the right direction…
Thanks for this very astute reflection.
We at the Journal of Musculoskeletal Medicine (musculoskeletalnetwork.com) are at the other end of the same boat, and trying to row in the same direction. How on earth can we provide busy doctors with exactly the information they need, and now?
Search engines, even Google, still don’t work too well at responding to natural-language queries. Uptodate.com and most review articles go on too long to serve the purpose at hand. Into what categories should WE divide our information to make it easiest for YOU to find it? Not just from EULAR, but everything?
Thanks for your comments Lois. I’m not the first to raise concerns about the future of big medical meeetings in recent months. There’s other examples here and here
Brian McGowan, who has commented on this blogpost has some useful suggestions here and will undoubtedly be addressing it in more detail in his new book SocialQI.
He has a good understanding on how medical meetings should run (and I’m not just saying that because he’s saying that I do!). I’m happy to engage with any of my educators on how they can improve my learning experience but part of the problem is that we’re not usually asked. I sometimes feel a little like a frustrated patient trying to negotiate an innefficient healthcare system. And I’m not sick.
Nice post, Ronan. I have concerns that we in medicine don’t listen outside of our own antiquated vertical. Lots of lessons out there and I suspect that these big meetings will go the way of Tower Records. We will always have the need to convene but the format will be different and much less episodic.
Its funny about big book stores. I am always overwhelmed in the megastores here in the states. It seems that I’m happier in the small airport bookstores. I guess I like it when someone curates for me.