Healthcare meetings
From problem-solving to value creation: designing the future of healthcare meetings
MURIEL POULENC, SENIOR DIRECTOR, SALES STRATEGY, RADISSON HOTEL GROUP, SAYS HEALTHCARE MEETINGS HAVE NEVER CARRIED GREATER EXPECTATIONS.
T oday, pharmaceutical
companies expect meetings to accelerate knowledge transfer, strengthen stakeholder engagement, support compliance requirements and deliver measurable business value. At the same time, planners are managing increasingly complex environments involving medical affairs, procurement teams, compliance functions, agencies and venue partners.
Despite this growing strategic importance, many healthcare meetings are still measured using traditional indicators: attendance numbers, satisfaction scores, budget performance and operational delivery. These metrics remain important, but are they enough?
Time to prioritise creating value over problem solving This question was at the centre of discussions when Radisson Hotel Group gathered 75 healthcare meeting planners, pharmaceutical sponsors, agencies and venue specialists in Florence in March 2026 for a Healthcare Knowledge Event dedicated to the future of healthcare meetings. Throughout the discussions, one challenge emerged repeatedly: meeting professionals are spending too much time solving problems and not enough time creating value. The distinction matters.
Operational excellence remains essential. A meeting that fails from a logistical perspective will never achieve strategic objectives. However, as healthcare meetings become more sophisticated, organisations must ask whether planners are being given the time and structure required to focus on the activities that have the greatest impact.
“ In many organisations, the role is evolving from event management toward strategic orchestration”
Traditionally, event planning has been viewed as an operational discipline. Success was often defined by the ability to execute a brief, secure a venue, manage suppliers and deliver a seamless attendee experience. Those capabilities remain fundamental. However, healthcare meetings increasingly demand something more.
Strategic orchestration Planners are expected to align stakeholders with competing priorities, facilitate complex decision-making processes, manage risk, support compliance requirements and create experiences that generate measurable outcomes. In many organisations, the role is evolving from event management toward strategic orchestration.
We believe this evolution requires a different way of looking at the planning process itself. During the Florence discussions, participants explored the Meeting Flow Efficiency Ratio( MFER), a practical analytical framework developed by 3Sixty Event Consulting specifically for the event. While not an established industry measure, it provides a useful way to examine how planning effort is divided between value creation and problem-solving.
The principle is simple. Not all planning effort creates equal value. Some activities directly contribute to successful outcomes:
• Stakeholder alignment
• Experience design
• Risk anticipation
• Strategic planning
• Decision facilitation Other activities consume substantial time without necessarily improving the final result:
• Duplicated approvals
• Administrative rework
• Process inefficiencies
• Unclear ownership
• Reactive issue management The purpose of MFER is not to create another metric for planners, its purpose is visibility. By distinguishing between
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