Medical Conference Reform: Creating the Patient-Centered Conference

Postgraduate medical conferences are a prominent feature of continuing medical education across all health-related disciplines. These gatherings aim to disseminate new medical innovations, technologies, and approaches to treatment as well as review core topics and procedural skills. Sessions are often led by subspecialty experts, but rarely do these experts collaborate to address clinical problems in the same patient context. We restructured our postgraduate medical conference by following a single patient longitudinally through their complex hospitalization. As the case evolves, subspecialists provided recommendations addressing specific medical dilemmas while working within the confines of the patient scenario. We present expert speaker perspectives, discuss challenges to this method of medical conference organization, and survey the audience on our presentation.