Your Team Is Still Pulling Conference Abstracts by Hand. There's a Better Way.

Nine thousand abstracts. Hundreds of parallel sessions. One or two reviewers who already have full workloads, and a leadership readout due the week the meeting ends.

That is the real math behind congress coverage at most Medical Affairs teams. It is why so much of this work still happens in a spreadsheet late at night, and why the coverage plan is often still being revised on the flight out.

The instinct is to treat that as a staffing problem. It isn't.

The manual approach breaks down exactly where it matters

The problem isn't effort — it's that manual abstract triage fails in the ways that count most.

A keyword search matches strings, not meaning. Search for your molecule by its generic name and you miss every abstract that used the brand name, the development code, or an abbreviation. Competitor data, mechanism-of-action discussions, and adjacent research slip through unless someone thought to add every possible term. And the volume is genuinely overwhelming: a major oncology congress can publish nine thousand-plus abstracts across hundreds of parallel sessions. No one can read, sort, and prioritize that by hand in the window available — especially not while also running trials, supporting the field, and keeping leadership informed.

So teams do their best, run out of time, and accept that some of what mattered got missed. They just never find out what.

What conference intelligence does instead

This is the work Datym automates. Instead of searching one keyword at a time, a team uploads its full keyword list — competitive terms, KOL names, pipeline compounds, mechanisms, priorities — and gets back a prioritized session coverage grid in seconds, not days.

Because the search is semantic, it catches abstracts by meaning, not just exact-string match — the brand-name-to-generic links, the mechanism references, the related terms a keyword list alone would miss. Every matched abstract carries its session type, date, time, location, presenter, and a direct link. KOLs the team tracks are flagged automatically when they appear as authors or presenters. And from the selected sessions, the team can generate a structured synthesis report in minutes rather than writing it from scratch.

What this looks like in practice

We recently ran a full search against all abstracts from a major oncology congress for a pharma client. Their keyword list ran to 590 terms across six categories — competitive intelligence, KOL names, pipeline compounds, mechanisms of action, clinical research, and Medical Affairs priorities.

The output: more than 2,800 matched abstracts from roughly 9,500 total, grouped by day and then by session, color-coded by priority (KOL-author matches, high-keyword-count hits, title matches), every title linked directly to the source abstract, with presenter, authors, session type, time, and location on every row.

Their team had been trying to build this by hand and was overwhelmed by the volume. We delivered it before the weekend.