TCT 2030

Over the last 3 decades, TCT (Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics) has become the sine qua non meeting for the global interventional community. The TCT meeting brings together thousands of physicians, health care team members, industry, government regulators, and researchers. It is the annual get-together for the crème de la crème in the world of interventional cardiology.

The meeting has outgrown its initial coronary confines and now encompasses the full spectrum of interventional practice, with its equally strong emphasis on the structural and the peripheral arenas. Beyond its clinical focus, TCT features a very strong research angle, with its lively poster sessions and always much anticipated late-breaking trial sessions. The regulatory corner, in excellent collaboration with the United States Food and Drugs Administration, has provided over the years an invaluable contribution to the device approval process.

Lastly, central in the TCT’s role in the spectrum of education of interventional cardiologists is the Exhibit Hall. This well-structured venue brings together all participants and is the true beating heart of the meeting. One can take the pulse of the interventional world by walking through the halls of TCT’s Exhibit Hall and obtain a reasonably accurate estimate of various “market” conditions.

Just like TCT, many contemporary scientific meetings have evolved. Today, it is becoming unimaginable to attend scientific meetings without live streaming, the presence of an engaged social media crowd, and simultaneous journal publication of late-breaking clinical trials.

Yet, there is no doubt that the current meeting format will not survive the next decade without a significant evolution. In my view, 2 major dynamic forces will transform the way we consume meetings—our carbon footprint and our electronic footprint.

The electronic footprint has been the destructive element of many meetings and will be the creative force for future ones. We want to consume meetings when we want them and how we want them. Real-time talks that cannot be replayed are rapidly losing their appeal. Limited discussion times with minimal audience feedback now feel quite unattractive. We consume news, movies, and meetings via streaming and tweets. Raise your hand if you still have a print newspaper subscription. This is evident by the explosive growth of medical Twitter. If you want a real-time global insight into what your colleagues/readers think and want, go to Twitter. You may get a better understanding of the topic from Twitter than by running between rooms in a ginormous conference center. All this comes with our woefully shortened attention span, which wasn’t very long for an interventionalist to start with.

How our electronic footprint will transform the meeting in 2030 is a real question. We will still want to learn, and we will still want to meet other people in person. It is hard to imagine we will want to walk into a dim conference room, view a typical PowerPoint-centric presentation, and then listen to a short panel discussion. To keep up with the times, meetings will need a new electronic communication tool beyond PowerPoint. We need a redesigned conference room interior design. The predominantly one-way communication from the podium down to the audience who sits in the dark and is allotted a brief opportunity for feedback seems outdated. To remain viable, meetings need to embrace electronic change fast.

The value that electronics cannot provide is the opportunity for face-to-face meetings. We all know how many good ideas, contacts, and projects originated from brainstorming sessions that started during “random” TCT meeting encounters. We all love bumping into colleagues during TCT. And that brings us to the second point—meetings carbon footprint.

There is no way around it—meetings are expensive, air travel carbon emissions are bad for the environment, and time away from home is priceless. There is no easy fix for this. Meetings will have to become more inclusive and facilitate communication among faculty members, industry, regulators, and “attendees.” They will have to provide a physical world equivalent to the electronic cloud we now reside in. You can tweet and direct message anybody anytime. Wouldn’t one want to have the same effortless ability in the physical world of the meeting? It seems that with our shortened attention span brought on by social media, the dollar value of the time we spend at meetings has increased. In the past, a few days at a meeting seemed acceptable because of our inability to consume the information electronically. Today, the current meeting duration seems excessive, although the meetings last about the same amount of time. The meeting in 2030 will have to adapt ecologically and economically—I call it the reduced carbon footprint meeting with improved networking opportunities.

This special issue of JACC: Case Reports features some of the best cases submitted to TCT 2019. We have carefully selected and provided rigorous peer review for cases with the greatest educational value. Can we imagine an evolution of this new TCT–JACC: Case Reports collaborative process? Open peer-review process? Interactive audience real-time peer-review? A fully grassroots voting-based publication manuscript selection process? The cases reported in JACC: Case Reports already are on Twitter from day 1 and are widely discussed. Everybody remembers their first TCT and their first publication. We at JACC: Case Reports wish to provide an educational experience for new authors to submit their first manuscript and learn the publication process. In 2030, I see the boundary between meetings and journals markedly blurred. Journals and meetings will become one unified platform for learning and networking.

One of the most common questions among cardiology fellows is “I love interventional cardiology, but are there new subspecialties within the field being developed where I could expand my skills?” A “physical meeting” like TCT may be well positioned to meet the needs of cardiology fellows. Millennials push for balance, and future meetings will have to weigh how much they focus on an information dissemination venue versus an engagement venue. A heavy carbon footprint meeting will remain indispensable in providing fellows-in-training opportunities to find their career niches. Although there is a lot of angst about the future of physical, carbon-heavy meetings, just imagine what the world would look like if we did not have them.

TCT serves as a unique platform for the lifelong learning of interventional cardiologists. It remains the indispensable annual meeting where new standards are set. We interventionalists love to attend TCT to learn and meet. We are fortunate to live in a decade with incredible electronic tools to make meetings do what they do best—bring people together in the physical world. Meet me (in person) at TCT 2030!