In April 2020, PHUSE announced that all Single Day Events would be virtual for the rest of the year. This was a positive for the Community as it ensured our SDEs would still take place, and with an unlimited capacity, too, as the virtualisation allowed the opportunity for global individuals to attend.
The first Virtual SDE was Spring House, held on 9th April, which was a celebratory success. The event welcomed an amazing 400+ registered attendees, compared to the 100-person physical capacity. The SDEs that followed went from strength to strength. The Bengaluru SDE attracted a staggering 1,700+ attendees. Read up on the event in PHUSE’s Virtual Single Day Event Success – Bengaluru.
More than 3,600 people attended our Virtual Single Day Events this year! This accounts for almost a quarter of the total SDE attendance since the very first one in 2008 – in a single year.
See what the PHUSE APAC and EMEA Regional Directors have to say about the success of their regions.
“This year forced us to adapt to many changes in a very short period of time. The PHUSE SDE Chairs, Board and Office met the challenge, as we transitioned to a virtual format for our events. We moved to better meeting technology for hosting virtual events, with the ON24 platform. The agenda and format of our SDEs evolved into an effective, collaborative and enjoyable forum for sharing presentations and interacting with speakers. One of the benefits of the SDEs being virtual – that we saw across the regions – was the bump in attendance numbers.
Thanks to all who have contributed to our PHUSE SDEs and especially to our sponsors and Community, who have continued to support our events through the pandemic.
Another change we experienced was a shift away from our traditional topics and into more technologies and methods used in data science. For example, in the Americas region, we discussed SAS Viya, Jupiter, Julia, Python, R programming and other technologies at the SDEs. We talked about RWD, and even the PHUSE Open Data Repository (PODR), as well as being able to go from zero to analysis in five minutes with the given analytics package.
A look at some of the topics presented at the Americas SDEs demonstrates how we are changing and adapting to the immediate and future needs of our industry:
- Spring House – The impact RWD is having in our industry
- Frenchtown – Leveraging analytics to drive risk-based quality management and the role of biostatistics
- Chicago – Best practices with meta-programming techniques
- Boston – A look at preparing eData submissions to the PMDA, considerations for metadata XML implementation, BIMO datasets and the open-source TidyCDISC application for interactive tables, figures and patient profiles
- Canton – Using machine learning and an introduction to our PODR
- Morrisville – More topics and use cases with machine learning”
– Chris Hurley, Americas Regional Director
“Thousands of APAC Single Day Event attendees have given very positive feedback, with word-of-mouth advertisement resulting in an increasing number of registrations.
Attendees said that it’s great having the SDEs virtual as it means no travel. They also enjoyed being able to pick and choose the presentations which were most relevant to them and skip those that weren’t.
They appreciated the way Q&A was organised: a moderator was able to read all the questions on chat and merge any similar ones together to ask as a single question. This enabled more questions to be answered than at physical SDEs. Individuals also valued the free registration and no restriction on the number of attendees; for physical SDEs, we limit registration to up to 20% of overall attendees from a single company.
It was a great experience and everyone in APAC is eagerly awaiting the 2021 SDEs!”
– Sarvesh Singh, APAC Regional Director
“The virtual Single Day Events in the EMEA region kicked off with two combined EMEA Bitesize events which pulled together presentations from across the region. The flexibility of a virtual event allowed us to plan more concise, and broader-ranged, events to allow members to dip in and out as they pleased.
From these initial events, we moved to the ON24 platform (as used for the virtual CSS and EU Connect) for our virtual Basel, Beerse and Heidelberg events. We found the Q&A tool made the presentations feel more interactive as our members took the time to pose questions alongside the presentations – it also allowed us to manage this process more efficiently. Similar to our other global events, virtual attendance was higher than for face-to-face events.
See you (virtually) in 2021!”
– John Salter, EMEA Regional Director
Stephen Bamford, PHUSE Founder and Chairman of the Board, announced in his recent PHUSE State of the Union webcast that all events for 2021 will be virtual – a decision that is the most prudent and safest for our Community.
Due to the brilliant success of our 2020 virtual events, we are sure to be set for another exciting and innovative year. Thank you to all Chairs, presenters and sponsors involved in our Single Day Events during 2020. We look forward to what 2021 will bring!
2021 dates will be released in the new year! Keep an eye on the Events Calendar on the new PHUSE website. In the meantime, catch up on any SDEs you may have missed this year via the Engagement Hub.
