How ATS helped Raul Cabello and the American College of Emergency Physicians with Access Controlled Attendance Tracking and Data Management.
Infinitely better experience for the attendees, staff, temps.
The Client
The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) represents more than 38,000 emergency physicians, emergency medicine residents, and medical students. As the largest Emergency Physician Association in the country, they promote the highest quality of emergency care. They are the leading advocate for emergency physicians and their patients and the public.
Their annual Scientific Assembly plays host to thousands of world-renowned emergency physicians. The College continually strives to improve the quality of emergency medical services by providing industry-leading continuing medical education (CME) in educational conferences. With more than 300 educational courses and labs, it serves as a place for continuing education and a networking hub amongst peers.
Raul Cabello works in ACEP’s Education Meetings department as a meeting planner. He is also the project manager for their Scientific Assembly, where he works to manage vendors, plan education logistics, hands-on skills labs, and cadaver labs.
The Challenge
“There was no in between this ancient ticket book to ATS…from ticket book to full on fledged technology of scanning badges.”
Before ATS, ACEP would mail ticket booklets to each attendee’s home. From there, attendees were responsible for bringing the booklet with them to the Assembly, as it was their ticket to attend sessions. This left much to be desired as a more robust report of these sessions were needed.
- Zero data was recorded. ACEP could not strategically plan sessions based on physical tickets, as it was both an inaccurate and manual process. This directly reflected other areas of their events as their forecasting ability was limited.
- Popular sessions would quickly reach capacity. This would leave many attendees unhappy as they could not participate in sessions that they RSVP’d to attend should the session be full at their arrival time. Arriving at a session an hour in advance to reserve a seat was counterproductive to preregistering to attend.
With the ability to accurately and electronically collect data that was invaluable in establishing the direction of future sessions, ACEP transitioned to Access Controlled Attendance Tracking and Data Management reporting.
The Solution
“Dramatic difference” “That data is crucial to planning anything”
Raul and his team saw positive results instantly.
One of the most impactful results Access Controlled Attendance Tracking provided was improving the flow of the sessions. Attendees were confident that they would be guaranteed a seat to attend if they previously registered for a session. Access to sessions is controlled by the encrypted QR code that prints on all badges. If an attendee registered for a specific session, that information is housed in the QR code. A door monitor would scan the QR Code, and the scanner would either approve or deny entry to the session.
Once session scanning was implemented, ACEP had access to robust reporting as accurate data collection was now available. “The logistics of session tracking helps in more than just letting people into the rooms. It’s collecting data of where these folks are, how many sessions, are these sessions sold out? Are they meeting capacity for the rooms?” This data is now a crucial piece in their education planning.
The Result
“It just makes the event experience that much better”
The American College of Emergency Physicians said their year without access-controlled session tracking led to unhappy attendees. After transitioning to access-controlled session tracking, attendees noticed the overall improvement flow of sessions. It was an “Infinitely better experience for the attendees, for our staff, the temps.” Moving forward, they will continue to have session tracking and access management as the data collected is crucial and ensures attendees access to sessions.