The conversations that don’t happen on screen – why meeting in person still matters in medical education

We can access more medical education than ever without leaving our desks. So why do thousands of healthcare professionals still travel to congresses every year?

It’s a question I find myself thinking about whenever I’m at a medical congress.

The way we access scientific information has changed dramatically. Sessions can be streamed from almost anywhere, presentations watched on demand, and important data shared across digital channels almost as soon as they are presented.

That’s a good thing. Education is more accessible, and being physically present should no longer be a prerequisite for keeping up with new evidence.

But perhaps that is exactly why the value of being there has changed.

When information itself is readily available online, travelling to a congress becomes less about simply receiving it.

The real value increasingly lies in what happens around it: discussing what the evidence means, hearing a different interpretation, challenging assumptions and understanding why something that makes perfect sense on a slide may be much harder to apply in clicical practice.

From hearing evidence to working through it

There will always be a place for a great scientific presentation. Complex research needs people who can explain it clearly.

But hearing information and making sense of it are not quite the same thing.

Some of the most interesting moments at congresses happen when the direction of communication changes. A question comes from the audience. A poll reveals that the room is divided. Two specialists approach the same patient differently. Someone asks, “But what would you actually do in practice?”

Suddenly, the audience isn’t simply receiving information. They’re part of the conversation.

We saw this during the Springer Health+ IME symposium at ESC Congress 2026, “Why your heart failure patient still isn’t improving: residual risk and the cardiorenal gap.”

Rather than treating the audience as passive observers, patient cases and live polling asked attendees to consider clinical decisions themselves. Those decisions then became part of a wider discussion between cardiology and nephrology experts.

What made the format interesting wasn’t necessarily reaching one ‘correct’ answer. It was making the uncertainty visible.

And in an area such as cardiorenal disease, that matters. The reality of managing a patient does not always fit neatly within the boundaries of one specialty. Bringing different perspectives into the same room gives people an opportunity to work through those grey areas together.

The conversations you can’t put on an agenda

There is another part of congresses that is harder to quantify.

It’s the conversation after a session. The question someone didn’t have time to ask at the microphone. The discussion over coffee about whether new evidence would actually change practice back home.

Those moments can sound secondary to the formal scientific programme, but often they’re anything but.

A clinician from one healthcare system may face a completely different barrier from someone treating a similar patient elsewhere. A recommendation that appears straightforward in a presentation may become much more complicated when access, referral pathways or local practice enter the conversation.

You rarely know in advance which conversation will prove useful. That’s part of their value.

For those of us developing medical education, these exchanges matter for another reason too: they help us listen.

They show us where healthcare professionals are uncertain, where evidence and practice are not quite connecting, and where another presentation may not actually be what people need. Sometimes the most useful insight for the next educational programme comes not from the podium, but from the questions being asked around it.

Digital or in person shouldn’t be the question

None of this means we should be trying to return medical education to a pre-digital world.

Quite the opposite.

Digital education gives us something incredibly valuable: reach, flexibility and the ability for learning to continue long after a congress has finished. Someone who couldn’t travel can still engage with the science. Someone who did attend can revisit it later.

The opportunity is to recognise that the two environments do different things well.

Digital is exceptionally good at distributing knowledge. Being together is exceptionally good at interrogating it.

The strongest educational experiences connect the two: creating meaningful discussion onsite and then giving that learning a life beyond the room.

Perhaps that’s why meeting in person still matters in such a digital world.

We may no longer need to travel somewhere simply to hear what’s new.

But there is still real value in sitting together and working out what it means.