In case your time is short:
The ASH Annual Meeting 2025 (December 6–9 in Orlando) will bring together over 30,000 hematologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals, making it the largest and most comprehensive hematology event in the world.
But success at an event this size takes more than just showing up. Here’s how to make the most of your time at ASH:
With more than 30,000 attendees and hundreds of sessions, effective outreach needs to start well in advance—ideally 4–5 months before the meeting. Begin segmenting your hematology KOLs by subspecialty (e.g., AML, CLL, myeloma, lymphoma) and start sending personalized invitations this summer.
Unlike smaller specialty meetings, ASH is structured around distinct tracks: malignant and non-malignant hematology, basic science, clinical practice, and emerging therapies. Make sure to map your team’s presence across these tracks ahead of time so you can prioritize the sessions and conversations that will matter most.
With new treatments rapidly shaping the field and novel mechanisms of action under investigation, the late-breaking sessions offer high-value opportunities for KOL engagement. Be sure to build them into your plan.
The ASH Poster Walks feature up to six key abstracts on emerging science. To capture insights efficiently, be ready with QR codes and digital tools that streamline note-taking and data collection.
Teams using ExtendMed's Health Expert Connect™ platform consistently report deeper, more valuable KOL connections at major events like ASH—compared to the fragmented, manual approaches many teams still rely on. Want to see how we can help elevate your ASH strategy? Contact us for a free personalized demo.
We've been helping pharmaceutical companies navigate medical congresses for years, and ASH's annual meeting presents a unique challenge for teams looking to come home with insights and strong connections with KOLs (and other stakeholders).
Where other meetings might have narrower focuses, ASH brings together 30,000+ professionals spanning everything from basic science researchers studying hematopoiesis to clinicians managing complex CAR-T therapies to health policy experts reshaping treatment access.
The mix of stakeholders makes it critical to plan your presence and start engaging even before the event. You can't just show up with a booth and hope for the best—not when your target KOLs might be scattered across dozens of different session tracks happening simultaneously. This is exactly why we built Health Expert Connect™—to help teams manage this complexity without drowning in spreadsheets, emails, and compliance concerns.
In this guide, we'll share our playbook for ASH and show how an engagement platform can help you maximize the ROI on events like this.
Before we dive into strategy, it’s worth taking just a second to understand what makes ASH stand apart from other major medical meetings.
The hematology community is highly collaborative. Many of these physicians have trained together, published research together, or served on the same guideline committees. That creates both unique opportunities and challenges when it comes to engagement.
Unlike in some specialties, hematologists often work across multiple disease areas. Your target AML specialist might also treat MDS patients, run bone marrow transplant programs, and conduct translational research. This means simple categorization won’t cut it—your outreach plan needs to reflect the full scope of each KOL’s expertise and interests.
That’s where platforms like Health Expert Connect™ really shine. Our system lets teams tag KOLs with multiple attributes—clinical focus, research interests, institutional affiliations, engagement history—and build dynamic segments for more targeted outreach. No more juggling separate spreadsheets for “AML” vs. “lymphoma” when the same physician may be deeply involved in both.
ExtendMed’s Health Expert Connect™ platform efficiently consolidates and manages multiple lists of healthcare professionals, ensuring a smooth event invitation process.
The meeting itself reflects this complexity. ASH organizes its content across several key domains:
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Each of these domains has its own thought leaders, session formats, and networking opportunities. A smart strategy needs to reflect this segmentation, while staying flexible enough to capture valuable cross-domain insights.
Over the years, we’ve supported many congress and medical meeting engagement campaigns and have found that the most successful teams start planning months in advance. While you can compress the timeline if needed, this month-by-month cadence gives your team a comfortable, proactive rhythm.
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The ASH Annual Meeting takes over the entire Orange County Convention Center, spread across multiple buildings—every square foot is used. Navigating it effectively takes planning.
Here are some tips to help your team make the most of their time on site.
Unlike smaller meetings where you can cover everything, ASH forces you to prioritize your tasks. We recommend focusing on key areas (see below). Teams using Health Expert Connect™ easily assign session coverage and track it in real time—no more last-minute scrambles.
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One of the biggest risks at a large congress like ASH is losing valuable insights in the shuffle. Health Expert Connect™ gives teams structured, consistent ways to capture and share what they learn:
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| Session Coverage |
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ASH’s Poster Walks—where leaders present 6 key abstracts at a time—require a more focused, agile approach than traditional poster sessions. Your team needs tools to capture insights quickly and thoroughly.
Health Expert Connect™ helps teams tackle this through:
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We strongly recommend mapping out your poster strategy ahead of time. Divide the team so you’re covering as many concurrent sessions and poster walks as possible, rather than having everyone cluster around the same handful of sessions. |
We’ve seen teams capture 3x more meaningful poster insights using this systematic approach compared to traditional note-taking.
Many hematologists work at institutions with strict policies regarding interactions. Manual compliance tracking doesn’t scale at a meeting like ASH, where your team may have dozens of members engaging with hundreds of KOLs across multiple venues.
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At an event as complex as ASH, this kind of automation is critical—without it, teams quickly get buried trying to manually track compliance across a mountain of interactions.
Beyond the standard congress playbook, ASH offers unique engagement venues, including:
This is where having a platform like Health Expert Connect™ really shines. While others scramble with business cards and scattered notes, our users execute systematic follow-up.
Let's start with organizing your insights immediately after the event—a huge pain point for those without a system. Within 24 hours of ASH ending, you'll have:
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Then we move to actually turning those connections from the event into lasting relationships through. Here’s how we do it—in sequence:
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| Medium-term Nurturing (2-8 weeks) |
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| Long-term Relationship Building (ongoing) |
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We’ve seen brilliant medical affairs teams—people who can talk for hours about the latest in CAR-T therapy or MRD assessment—get completely bogged down by the operational chaos of a major congress.
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Here’s how it usually happens: They start by sending outreach emails. Then they manage responses in spreadsheets. Expenses are tracked in a separate system. Calendars live somewhere else. Insights get logged in yet another tool. By the second day of an event like ASH, the team is overwhelmed with administrative work instead of focusing on what really matters—building relationships with hematologists who could advance their programs. |
We’ve watched invaluable insights slip through the cracks simply because there was no centralized way to capture them. Someone has a great conversation with a top myeloma expert about promising combination therapies, jots a note on a business card—and three days later, it’s gone. Or they remember the conversation, but not who said what, so the follow-up is lost.
And the compliance risks? Very real. When expenses are tracked manually across dozens of team members engaging with hundreds of KOLs, errors happen. We’ve seen teams scrambling months later to reconstruct records for Sunshine Act reporting because their tracking system failed.
But what really hurts to see is the missed opportunities from poor coordination. One MSL schedules a meeting with a KOL, unaware that a colleague already has an established relationship. Or two team members approach the same hematologist with conflicting messages, simply because there’s no shared system to track interactions.
That’s exactly why we built Health Expert Connect™ differently. When everything—your KOL database, communication history, meeting schedules, insights, compliance records, and expenses—lives in one platform, your team can focus on what they do best: advancing medicine through meaningful relationships.
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The impact is transformational: Instead of spending 60% of their time on administrative tasks, teams spend that time having deeper conversations, capturing richer insights, and building stronger relationships. That’s not just more efficient. That’s what drives your hematology programs forward. |
ASH is too important and too expensive to approach haphazardly. The teams that succeed are those that treat congress planning as a systematic process rather than a series of disconnected activities.
Our clients consistently report:
But beyond the metrics, what really matters is this: when your team can focus on building relationships instead of managing logistics, you achieve the real purpose of congress attendance—advancing your hematology pipeline through meaningful KOL engagement.
Don't let another ASH pass while wrestling with spreadsheets, email chains, and manual compliance tracking. Health Expert Connect™ brings everything together in one powerful, purpose-built platform.
Contact us today to schedule your personalized demo. We'll show you exactly how Health Expert Connect™ can transform your ASH strategy, using real examples from successful hematology congress campaigns. Because in hematology, relationships matter. And we're here to help you build them—systematically, compliantly, and meaningfully.
Ready to revolutionize your congress planning? Let's talk. Your KOLs—and your team—will thank you.
Currently managing congress planning across multiple disconnected systems? We'll help you centralize everything in Health Expert Connect™. Most teams are fully operational within two weeks. Schedule your demo now and see why leading pharma companies trust ExtendMed for their most important hematology engagements.