Heart Rhythm Society chooses EventPilot medical meeting app for its annual meeting to "Go Green" and save paper. By cutting print in half and creating a more sustainable event, HRS was able to have a positive environmental impact and reduce its CO2 footprint, reduce waste and water, all while saving over $100,000. In 2015, HRS is planning to eliminate its printed event program.
Heart Rhythm Green Initiative
Conference app success story: Paperless events.
Heart Rhythm Society saves over 2.4 million pages of paper with EventPilot Medical Meeting App in 2014 and 2015 combined
As the international leader in science, education and advocacy for cardiac arrhythmia professionals and patients, the Heart Rhythm Society (HRS) attracts 12,000 attendees from 72 countries worldwide to its annual meeting. With a large, complex conference program, providing convenient and cost effective resources to attendees is critical for success.
Other Event Apps Not Reliable Enough
In 2011, HRS began testing different apps created by a variety of vendors over a three-year period. With each of these implementations, the Society felt that the conference apps used were too cumbersome to implement and challenging for attendees to use.
These apps didn’t offer intuitive navigation and could not display thousands of abstracts reliably offline. Other mobile conference apps required HRS to constantly resubmit the app as new information and resources were being added for attendee access. This resulted in long delays that negatively impacted the user experience and inhibited the Society’s ability to provide a fluid and reliable mobile resource.
Three years later, on the heels of initiating an organization-wide “going green” campaign, HRS began searching for a way to create an engaging alternative to printing upwards of 9,000 hardcopies of its 350-page annual scientific sessions program book.
The organization also needed an easy way to integrate over 1,300 research abstracts into a mobile event app that could offer high performance for such massive amounts of content with the ability to make updates on the fly.
“In addition to helping us achieve a positive environmental and financial impact, our attendees were able to fully rely on the app to easily browse and schedule sessions, locate exhibitors and network with other attendees,” said Tim Gregory, VP at the Heart Rhythm Society. “The EventPilot mobile conference app is designed for medical events like ours and even made it simple for attendees to track certified education credits.”
“Our attendees were able to fully rely on the app to easily browse and schedule sessions, locate exhibitors and network with other attendees”
Tim Gregory, VP at the Heart Rhythm Society
“Event attendees reacted positively to our shift from a printed program to the conference app. During the first day of the conference, several people were toting along our program book, but by day two a vast majority had migrated to our conference app. It was actually really cool to see.” When comparing Heart Rhythm 2013 to the 2014 meeting, the number of visits to the organization’s mobile conference app increased by 108%.
“The EventPilot team expertly orchestrated the creation of our conference app,” said Tim. “We’re eager to build on last year’s success by broadening the reach of the educational experiences and exhibitor engagements we can provide using EventPilot.”