New Technology: asQ-us

Guest Blog by: Anthony Casimano

We’ve just returned from this year’s Open Forum – a New York gathering of Otolaryngists (Ear, Nose, Throat Doctors) – for a two-day educational event.  This year, technology was abound with the intent of fostering their mantra of “Where Every Voice Counts”.    A combination of iPads®, Smartphones, Audience Response Keypads, Twitter®, and hands-on activities allowed the audience to participate, network, “check-in”, and interact with each other and the on-site experts in an unprecedented way.

Our featured technology, asQ-us, was dubbed “Chalk Talk” by the meeting committee and was an essential instrument for on-demand audience participation.  Using mobile phones with simple text messaging (SMS), audience members could pose questions, make comments, ask for clarifications, and most importantly, receive immediate feedback from a panel of experts.  We created a raised staging platform with six computer workstations, from which the experts viewed, organized, and responded to audience comments in real-time.  Not only were the doctors able to directly answer questions coming in, but they also had the ability to “push” that content to the on-stage moderator for instant consideration when they identified a provocative or common thread.  Attendees were often surprised to hear a direct response to one of their texted questions so quickly and outside of the scheduled Q&A sessions.

The panel was particularly busy during the live case studies of complex sinus procedures, with questions ranging from “what size device is the doctor using for this procedure?” to “He’s doing that all wrong!”.   This year we had over 700 messages received and answered during the two-day event and posted many of the relevant conversations on Twitter as well.  We also used asQ-us to send out reminders, updates and notifications to all attendees; a great way to keep them connected to the conference while inside or outside of the meeting room.

This proprietary system can accommodate Q&A sessions (as above), broadcast messaging, simple polling via SMS, and advanced polling on Smartphones and iPads as well.