In partnership with the Vienna Convention Bureau and research firm Triconsult, the European Society of Radiology, the world’s largest professional community in the biomedical field with over 80,000 members across 193 countries, conducted a research on the value of its congresses.
Titled ‘The Sustainability of Scientific Congresses – European Congress of Radiology 2018’, the findings, which were derived from a sample of nearly 10% of speakers responding to detailed questionnaires distributed by the society, revealed that the value of the professional time spent compiling, and the research funding associated with, the content of 3,331 papers presented at the European Society of Radiology`s 2018 Congress, amounted to 813 million euros.
Commenting on the importance of the study, Executive Director of the European Society of Radiology, Peter Baierl, said: “Our mission is education. We live in a world of numbers and everyone, wherever they come from, can go with those numbers to whomever is important; the public, the industry, or our customers – the doctors.”
Monika Hierath, European Society of Radiology director of European & International Affairs and executive manager, European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research added: “Radiology is crucial in the diagnostic process of modern healthcare. But it is also playing a role in the entire healthcare pathway – for treatment selection, monitoring, and assessment of treatment outcome. We attract researchers, industry leaders, and other stakeholders including policymakers [to the congress] from the European Commission but also international organisations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or the World Health Organisation (WHO). This creates very fertile ground for knowledge exchange and knowledge transfer but also beyond the scientific community into practise, policies, and actions”.
“We wanted to establish what value is associated with presenting scientific papers at scientific congresses”, commented Christian Mutschlechner, director of the Vienna Convention Bureau. “We started in 1991 with ‘Economic Impact Studies’ [measuring visitor spend]. For the European Society of Radiology`s congress you can expect an economic impact of 40-65 million euros when 20,000 visitors stay in Vienna for 4 days. But the value of the knowledge presented at the congress might range from between 500-850 million euros – ten times that of the economic impact…”
Our partners at The Iceberg produced a video about it: