Congress Planning for Medical Affairs Teams

Congress planning works better backward. Start from the insights and scientific exchanges the team needs from the meeting, then decide which sessions, posters, experts and booth conversations serve them. Agenda-first plans fill calendars and produce session summaries. Objective-first plans produce a post-congress report that changes a medical plan.

Major medical congresses consume a large share of a medical affairs team's year: abstract planning, poster production, staffing, expert meetings, booth preparation, travel. The usual planning document starts from the program, assigns people to sessions, and ends with a recap that summarizes what was presented. Much of that summary was available from the congress website.

This guide reverses the order. It covers setting the questions first, building coverage from them, capturing insight on the floor, staying within the rules for scientific exchange, and writing a report that ends in actions. It is part of the medical affairs operations guide.

Why Agenda-First Plans Underdeliver

Starting from the program optimizes for coverage, which is not the same as learning. Teams spread across every session that seems relevant, attend the same high-profile presentations as everyone else, and return with notes on content that will be published anyway. What gets missed is the part only people in the room can gather: how clinicians reacted, what they asked, what worried them, and who is emerging.

Start With the Questions

The same key insight questions that drive field capture, described in MSL insight capture, should drive congress planning, narrowed to what this particular meeting can answer.

The Planning Timeline

Abstract decisions are made many months ahead, which is why objectives must be set early. Publication planning should follow recognized authorship and transparency standards, such as the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, and encore presentations need to be planned with the congress rules in mind.

Coverage: Who Goes Where

Coverage built from questions is usually smaller and sharper than coverage built from the agenda. It also makes staffing decisions easier to explain. Expert network maps help here: knowing which clinicians connect to which audiences shows which conversations are worth seeking out. That mapping is covered in KOL identification and mapping.

Capturing Insight on the Floor

Insight captured from memory a week later is weaker and harder to compare. The working pattern is short structured entries each evening using the same fields as field capture, tagged to the congress questions, followed by a brief daily review of emerging themes so coverage can shift on day two if something unexpected appears.

Questions asked at the medical booth that need a formal answer should be logged as medical information requests and handled through the normal process, not answered informally and lost. That process is covered in medical information request handling.

Medical Booth and Scientific Exchange Rules

Congresses concentrate the compliance questions medical affairs handles every day. The medical presence should be clearly separated from promotional activity, staffed by medical personnel, and non-promotional in content and tone. Unsolicited questions about unapproved uses can be answered appropriately, as described in FDA's 2011 draft guidance on unsolicited requests. Proactive sharing of scientific information on unapproved uses follows FDA's January 2025 final guidance on such communications.

Hospitality, meetings with experts and any payments are governed by industry codes, including the PhRMA, EFPIA and IFPMA codes, and by the congress organizer's own rules. International meetings bring several codes into play at once, so the briefing before the meeting should state which apply.

The Post-Congress Report That Gets Read

Leadership does not need a session-by-session summary. It needs to know what the team learned that it did not know before, what that means, and what will change. Writing the report within a few weeks, while the actions are still relevant, matters as much as its structure. Tracking those actions to closure gives a congress metric more meaningful than attendance, in line with the measures in medical affairs metrics beyond activity counts.

A Congress Planning Checklist

• Key questions for the congress agreed and owned
• Abstract and encore plans aligned with publication standards
• Coverage plan mapped from questions, not the agenda
• Pre-congress briefing covering data, applicable codes and capture fields
• Structured capture each evening, with a daily theme review
• Booth questions logged as medical information requests where needed
• Report within four weeks, ending in owned actions
• Actions tracked to closure

References

• Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. www.icmje.org
• Communications From Firms to Health Care Providers Regarding Scientific Information on Unapproved Uses of Approved/Cleared Medical Products: Questions and Answers. US Food and Drug Administration, final guidance, January 2025. www.fda.gov
• Responding to Unsolicited Requests for Off-Label Information About Prescription Drugs and Medical Devices. US Food and Drug Administration, draft guidance, December 2011. www.fda.gov
• PhRMA Code on Interactions with Health Care Professionals. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. www.phrma.org
• EFPIA Code of Practice. European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations. www.efpia.eu
• IFPMA Code of Practice. International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations. www.ifpma.org

This guide describes process and regulatory expectations in general terms and is not legal or regulatory advice. Confirm the current version and applicability of any code or guidance for your products and markets.