How Do Medical Affairs Teams Cover a Medical Congress?

Medical congresses like ASCO, ESMO, ASH, and IDWeek are where the science that shapes a therapeutic area gets presented first. For pharmaceutical and biotech Medical Affairs teams, covering these meetings well is one of the most important and most demanding parts of the year. Here's what congress coverage actually involves, and where teams tend to struggle.

What "covering a congress" really means

Congress coverage is the work of tracking, capturing, and synthesizing the scientific data presented at a meeting so that a Medical Affairs team, and the leadership it supports, understands what happened and what it means for their programs. It spans three phases: before, during, and after the meeting.

Good coverage isn't watching every session. It's deciding, ahead of time, exactly what matters to your assets, competitors, and therapeutic and ensuring nothing in that set slips through. But it also means keeping your ear to the ground on site for things that might not necessarily have been on the agenda – insights or information shared at the conference. It’s also analyzing the meeting itself to determine if it will continue to be valuable or to plan future data releases or educational activities.

Before the congress: planning and triage

Weeks before a major meeting, the abstract set is released and often consists of thousands of abstracts across hundreds of parallel sessions. The first job is triage: sorting that volume down to the presentations that actually matter to your team.

This is harder than it sounds. A keyword search for your molecule misses every abstract that refers to it by a different name — a generic name, a brand name, a development code, or an abbreviation. Competitor data, mechanism-of-action discussions, and adjacent research all need to be caught too. Teams that do this well build a prioritized coverage grid: which sessions to attend, who's presenting, when, and why each one matters. It also means identifying trends across topics or associations between presentations that contribute to deeper insights.

During the congress: capture under pressure

On site, the challenge shifts to bandwidth. Sessions run in parallel, KOL conversations happen between them, and the day rarely ends before a dinner. Yet the expectation is often a same-day or next-morning readout of what mattered. Field notes, session takeaways, and competitive observations all have to be captured while they're fresh. Frequently that means late at night, after a full day, before the details fade.

For lean teams, this is where coverage breaks down: there simply aren't enough people to be in every room and still write it all up. And the same people are also keeping the lights on at the home office, running the clinical trials, providing medical monitoring, and keeping leadership informed.

After the congress: synthesis

Once the meeting ends, the raw material (abstracts, session notes, captured data) has to become something leadership can act on. That usually means a post-congress report: an executive summary of the key themes, structured profiles of the most important presentations, and a clear "so what for us" on each. This synthesis is the deliverable that justifies the whole effort, and it's often produced under a tight deadline, right as the team is turning to the next priority.

Where teams struggle

Three pressures show up again and again: the sheer volume of abstracts to triage, the bandwidth crunch of capturing sessions on site, and the turnaround expectation on the post-congress report. For large teams, the challenge is coordination across many people. For small and emerging biotech teams — often with no dedicated congress-operations staff or even a field team — the challenge is that all of this lands on a few scientists who already have full-time roles.

Making congress coverage manageable

The teams that cover congresses well share a habit: they define what they're looking for before the meeting starts, and they use tools and processes to catch it efficiently rather than trying to read everything by hand. Increasingly, that includes AI-powered conference intelligence — automating the abstract triage, the coverage grid, and the first draft of the synthesis, so the scientists can focus on being present at the meeting and engaging with the science, not on the administrative load around it. These tools blend speed with accuracy and the instantaneous ability to see synergies and connections across data that could take a human team weeks to analyze.

Datym is conference intelligence, built for exactly this. It triages the full abstract set against your assets and competitors, and generates the deliverables Medical Affairs actually uses — so even a lean team can cover a major congress comprehensively.