Pharma's engagement problem: Are we expecting too much from individual events?

Across its global estate, Radisson Hotel Group hosts and helps plan more than 150,000 meetings each year from the venue perspective. This brings our teams into close collaboration with the planners, sponsors, and budget holders who shape the objectives, content, and investment behind them. Alongside this day-to-day experience, industry engagement activities provide direct insights from those at the heart of healthcare meeting planning. Together, these perspectives help us understand how expectations are changing – and what this means for the future of pharmaceutical meetings.

Healthcare professionals have never had more ways to access information. Scientific content is now available through congresses, journals, webinars, podcasts, online communities and, increasingly, AI-powered tools. At the same time, healthcare professionals are facing growing time pressures, increasing regulatory requirements, and heavier clinical workloads. For pharmaceutical companies, this creates a new engagement challenge.

A broader engagement strategy

The question is no longer simply how to attract healthcare professionals to an event. The bigger challenge is how to create meaningful engagement in an environment where attention is increasingly fragmented and where scientific exchange must compete with an abundance of information sources. This raises an important question: are pharmaceutical companies still expecting too much from individual healthcare events?

Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes. The answer is not to reduce investment in face-to-face meetings. On the contrary, scientific congresses, advisory boards, and educational meetings remain among the most powerful engagement tools available to the pharmaceutical industry. Bringing clinicians together around scientific discussion creates an impact that no digital channel can fully replicate.

However, many organisations still approach healthcare meetings as standalone moments, rather than components of a broader engagement strategy. Success is often measured through attendance figures, satisfaction scores, and event execution. These metrics remain valuable, but they do not necessarily tell us whether the interaction created lasting engagement, stronger relationships, or meaningful changes in behaviour.

A catalyst, not a conclusion

How do healthcare meetings create lasting engagement, rather than simply successful events? The most successful healthcare meetings are rarely isolated events – they are part of a wider ecosystem.

Value is often created before and after the meeting itself. Pre-event engagement, stakeholder preparation, peer collaboration, and post-event follow-up are frequently more influential than the event agenda alone. This reflects a broader shift taking place across the pharmaceutical industry.

Medical affairs teams are increasingly embracing omnichannel engagement models. Commercial teams are building customer journeys, rather than individual touchpoints. Digital transformation programs are focused on creating continuous experiences, rather than isolated interactions.

Healthcare professionals themselves appear to be moving in the same direction. Findings from the 2026 Healthcare Professional Congress Experience Report showed that 69% wanted easy access to congress materials through a central digital resource, 58% valued customised content, and 56% wanted communications consolidated in one place. The same report found that 66% of healthcare professionals attending an industry-sponsored symposium said the information had influenced their clinical practice or prescribing behaviour. Meetings clearly work. The bigger opportunity is ensuring their impact continues long after the event itself.

Healthcare meetings should evolve in the same direction. Rather than viewing a congress as a destination, organisations can begin to see it as one stage within a broader engagement ecosystem. The difference may appear subtle, but it fundamentally changes planning priorities.

Instead of focusing exclusively on the event itself, planners and sponsors start asking different questions:

• What needs to happen before the event to maximise participation and readiness?

• How can insights generated during the meeting be extended into future interactions?

• What mechanisms will sustain engagement once participants return to their daily professional environment?

The answers often lead to a more connected approach: educational content may begin weeks before a meeting through targeted scientific resources, advisory board insights can continue through smaller working groups, congress discussions can generate follow-up collaborations, regional exchanges, and ongoing knowledge-sharing communities.

In this model, the event becomes a catalyst, rather than a conclusion. Importantly, ecosystem thinking is not about creating more meetings. It is about creating more continuity. Some of the most meaningful healthcare interactions occur in smaller and more focused settings. Regional roundtables, peer exchanges, virtual scientific discussions and specialist working sessions can all play a role within a broader engagement strategy.

Building an integrated engagement ecosystem

The objective is not volume – the objective is relevance. For healthcare professionals, this creates a more personalised and flexible experience. For pharmaceutical companies, it creates opportunities to deepen scientific exchange, improve engagement, and strengthen relationships over time. For meeting professionals, it fundamentally expands the strategic role they can play.

The planner's contribution is no longer limited to successfully delivering a meeting. It extends to designing engagement journeys that support learning, collaboration, and decision-making over a much longer period. The pharmaceutical industry has spent decades refining how meetings are delivered. The next opportunity may be to rethink how they are connected.

The organisations that will create the greatest value in the coming years are unlikely to be those hosting the largest events. They will be those capable of building integrated engagement ecosystems where each interaction reinforces the next, where scientific exchange continues beyond the congress hall, and where meetings become part of a continuous journey, rather than a single moment in time.

The future of healthcare meetings is not about replacing events – it is about making every event part of a bigger conversation.

About the author

Muriel Poulenc is senior director, sales strategy at Radisson Hotel Group, where she leads the group's global sales strategy, shaping industry action plans and guiding telesales teams to align the right business with the right hotels. With over eight years at Radisson Hotel Group, Poulenc has built deep expertise in strategic industries and healthcare sector meetings. She previously served as director of strategic industries, driving revenue and commercial performance across meetings & events, and before that as healthcare account director. Poulenc brings particular insight into the regulatory complexities of healthcare and medical society meetings, including venue selection criteria, hospitality limits, transfer-of-value requirements, and confidentiality needs, helping organisations navigate the unique journey of hosting compliant, well-executed events for internal and HCP attendees.