The congress is in nine days. The agenda sits in a spreadsheet with four hundred rows, the travel list was set in August, and three MSLs have each flagged the same plenary as the one they want. Nobody has written down what the company actually needs to learn from this meeting. That question tends to get answered on the flight home, when someone has to write the readout.
Congress coverage is the way a medical affairs team decides which sessions at a scientific congress it will attend, who is in each room, what gets written down, and what leadership reads once the meeting closes. This post walks through a congress coverage plan from the first planning call to the readout, and where it usually breaks.
Quick answer: A medical congress coverage plan starts with three to five scientific questions the team needs answered at the meeting. Sessions are tiered against those questions, with time held back for late-breaking abstracts that many societies don't publish until the day they are presented. Each priority session gets a named owner, and that person writes a structured note in the room. Within a few days of the meeting closing, the notes become a reviewed readout for leadership, and the follow-ups promised to experts are tracked as actions with owners.
A congress is a scientific meeting run by a society, such as ASCO, ASH or ESMO. The company attends but doesn't set the agenda, which separates it from the dinners, advisory boards and speaker programs a company hosts itself. That also sets the tone for the field team. The 2021 joint position statement from APPA, IFAPP, MAPS and the MSL Society says MSLs should keep their independence from sales and interact with external experts only in a non-promotional context (Theron et al., 2021). At a congress, the MSL who covers a competitor's data and then talks to the investigator in the hallway is doing scientific exchange. Standing at the commercial booth answering product questions is a different role.
Congresses still carry weight with clinicians. An IQVIA article, citing EPG Health research from 2023, reports that three-quarters of HCPs consider attending a congress in person a critical or very important channel for scientific content and networking (IQVIA, 2025). The experts you want to hear from are in the building.
Most coverage plans start with the agenda. The better ones start with a short list of questions, written by the medical director before anyone opens the program. For example: does the updated overall survival data from the competitor's trial change how community oncologists think about second-line treatment? Are the investigators in our own Phase 3 program presenting anything that will shape the conversation at launch? What are the guideline authors saying about sequencing?
Three to five questions is about right. With more, every session starts to look like a priority, and a team of six ends up spread across forty rooms with nothing it can act on.
The questions come out of the medical plan the team already has. For a team building field medical before launch, the pre-launch field medical post covers how those priorities get set in Phase 3.
Once the questions exist, the agenda becomes a filter. Sort each session that touches them into one of three groups.
Then hold some capacity back. Plenty of societies don't publish their most important abstracts with the rest of the program. For UEG Week 2026, regular abstracts went online about three weeks before the congress, while top abstracts and late-breakers appeared only on the day of their session (UEG embargo policy). At EHA2026, regular abstracts were published on May 12 and late-breaking abstracts on June 2, with the late-breaking oral session on June 14 (EHA2026 embargo policy). A plan that's fully booked from the published program has no one free for the late-breaker that matters most.
Last, list the experts you already track who are presenting, chairing or registered. That list is the engagement plan for the meeting. The KOL engagement strategy post explains how expert tiering is built, and the same tiers decide who gets a planned conversation.
Assignment is where a plan becomes a schedule, and it fails in predictable ways. Two MSLs end up in the same plenary. Nobody covers the poster walk on the second afternoon. One person is booked into back-to-back sessions in halls ten minutes apart, and the problem surfaces the morning of the talk. Most of this is prevented by matching people to sessions on expertise and existing expert relationships, looking at each person's whole day, checking overlaps at the moment of assignment, and keeping one owner of the schedule, usually the congress lead. A later post takes assignment on its own.
The note written during the session is the most valuable thing the team produces at a congress, and the easiest to lose. A week later it's a fragment in someone's notebook that nobody else can read.
A useful session note records what was presented, in enough detail that a colleague who wasn't there could explain it, and what it means for the questions in the plan. It notes what experts said about it, in the room or afterward. It also records any follow-up that was promised, to whom, and by when. That last part is where teams lose ground with experts, because a promised reprint or a request to connect with a medical colleague is easy to forget once the meeting is over.
Write the note during or right after the session, while the detail is fresh. Check the society's recording policy before the meeting too, because rules on photographing slides and posters vary from one congress to the next.
Some of what MSLs hear will be an insight, something an expert said that the company should act on. Those deserve their own record with an owner. The field medical insights post covers how to write one that holds up. Unsolicited questions from HCPs about off-label use are different again. The same position statement says such requests need to be documented appropriately. That record goes to medical information, so the conversation in the hallway is not treated as the approved response.
If your next congress is still a spreadsheet and a group chat, bring the agenda. In twenty minutes we can walk through the coverage calendar, the note in the room, and the draft report that comes from those notes.
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Leadership rarely wants a summary of every session. They want to know what changed. A good congress readout is short and organized around the questions from the plan: what the team learned, what experts said, what competitors showed, and what the team recommends. Session detail goes in an appendix.
When a readout disappoints, it's usually because it arrived late, and the cause is assembly. Notes arrive by email in different formats, someone rebuilds them into slides, and by the time the deck is ready the moment to act on it has passed. In the same article, IQVIA observes that intentional interactions with external experts at congresses can be "patchy, non-specific and at times, uncoordinated" (IQVIA, 2025). A readout built from scattered notes tends to inherit the same problem.
Set the readout date and the reviewer before the meeting. Treat follow-ups as actions with owners and due dates, kept somewhere the medical director can check.
TikaConference is TikaMobile's software for covering a scientific congress. The congress lead plans from a session grid showing each session's date, time, speaker, room, type and track. Coverage sits on a calendar with one row per MSL in thirty-minute slots. A session can be dragged onto a person, overlaps are flagged when the assignment is made, and an MSL who starts a note on a session is assigned to it.
In the room, more than one MSL can write on the same session note, and it saves as they type. A session is marked Tracked once a note exists, so the congress lead can see which priority sessions still have nothing written. Attendees show city, KOL tier, KOL stage and whether the HCP is on the monitored list, and the name opens the HCP profile the team already uses. A note can be saved as an insight, one per session, and the follow-up continues in TikaInsights.
After the meeting, AI drafts three views from the notes already captured: a conference summary, a session summary, and an insights summary. A person in medical affairs reviews the draft before it is sent. TikaConference can run with TikaMSL, on its own, or beside the CRM a company already uses, including Veeva or Salesforce. Dinners, advisory boards and speaker programs the company runs belong in TikaSpeaker Bureau.
A team sending two MSLs to one congress a year can run coverage well in a spreadsheet and a shared document. The questions, the tiers and the habit of writing the note in the room matter more than the tool. What breaks is scale. Once several people cover several congresses with shared experts and a readout due the next week, the spreadsheet becomes one of many records. The longer case for that shift is in conference intelligence for medical affairs.
Some of the work doesn't move to software at all. Someone has to choose the questions, decide which late-breaker is worth pulling a person off a planned session, and judge whether a competitor's subgroup analysis actually changes anything. A drafted readout still needs a medical reviewer who was close enough to the meeting to know what's missing from it.
Congress coverage is how a medical affairs team plans and runs its presence at a scientific congress run by a society: which sessions to attend, who attends each one, how notes and expert conversations are captured, and what readout leadership receives afterward. It covers meetings the company attends, as distinct from events the company hosts.
A coverage plan should include the scientific questions the team needs answered, a tiered list of sessions tied to those questions, a named owner for each priority session, the experts the team expects to see, capacity held back for late-breaking abstracts, and a date and reviewer for the readout. It should also say how follow-ups promised to experts will be tracked.
MSLs attend assigned scientific sessions and posters, write notes on what was presented and what it means, and hold non-promotional scientific conversations with experts. They also capture insights from those conversations and document any unsolicited requests so they can be answered through the proper channel.
A useful post-congress report answers the questions set before the meeting: what the team learned, what experts said, what competitors presented, and what the team recommends. Session-level detail goes in an appendix. Follow-ups promised to experts should be tracked as actions with owners and due dates, kept outside the report.
Pick the next congress your team is attending and write down the three to five questions it needs to answer there. Then check whether every must-cover session has one owner and whether anyone is free when the late-breakers land. If you want to see how the session grid, the calendar, the notes and the drafted readout look on one record, we can walk through it with that meeting's agenda.
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