We've been helping pharmaceutical companies navigate medical congresses for years, and AAOS Annual Meeting presents unique opportunities for teams looking to connect with orthopedic thought leaders.
As the world's largest orthopedic meeting, AAOS brings together 30,000+ professionals spanning every subspecialty—from pediatric spine surgeons to sports medicine specialists to trauma experts managing complex fractures.
The sheer scale and diversity make strategic planning essential. You can't just show up with a booth and hope for the best—not when your target KOLs might be scattered across multiple venues in the massive Morial Convention Center, attending any of the dozens of concurrent sessions.
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 AAOS and show how an engagement platform can help you maximize the ROI on events like this.
Before diving into strategy, it's worth understanding what makes AAOS unique among medical meetings.
The orthopedic community is highly interconnected yet subspecialized. Many surgeons have trained at the same fellowship programs, collaborate on research, or serve together on specialty society committees. This creates both opportunities and challenges for engagement.
Unlike some specialties, orthopedic surgeons often practice across multiple domains. Your target joint replacement surgeon might also perform trauma call, teach residents, and conduct outcomes research. This means simple categorization won't work—your outreach strategy 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—subspecialty focus, procedural expertise, research interests, institutional affiliations, engagement history—and build dynamic segments for more targeted outreach.
No more juggling separate spreadsheets for "spine surgeons" vs. "sports medicine docs" when the same physician may be deeply involved in both.
Each domain 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-specialty insights.
Based on our experience supporting multiple AAOS campaigns, here's when to start each planning phase. While this timeline can be compressed, these monthly milestones represent the most comfortable and proactive cadence.
Fall is when you should start consolidating your orthopedic KOL lists. But here's where many teams stumble: they treat all orthopedic surgeons the same. With Health Expert Connect™, you can organize your outreach far more strategically by tagging KOLs based on:
For example, if your company is launching a novel joint preservation technology, we can help you segment your list of 2,000+ orthopedic surgeons into distinct communities using Health Expert Connect™.
This level of segmentation allows you to craft messages that resonate with each group's specific interests—a sports medicine surgeon caring about return-to-play timelines versus a joint replacement surgeon focused on implant longevity—instead of generic, one-size-fits-all emails.
By early November, with AAOS registration opening on November 3rd, surgeons are actively planning their New Orleans schedules. This is prime time for outreach.
Pro tip: The early bird registration deadline is December 7th—many attendees finalize their plans around this date. Health Expert Connect™ helps you capitalize on this timing by streamlining fall outreach with:
An important messaging tip here: Based on our experience, orthopedic surgeons respond best to clinical outcomes data and surgical technique improvements. Lead with objective results—patient-reported outcomes, return to function timelines, complication rates—rather than just biomechanical advantages.
In Health Expert Connect™, you can tailor different message templates for different segments (emphasizing quick recovery for sports medicine docs, long-term survivorship for arthroplasty surgeons) while maintaining a complete record of all outreach.
This is when you finalize your scientific content, booth materials, and digital assets. But don't just focus on what you'll present—think about what you'll capture.
Health Expert Connect™ serves as your central content repository:
Everything lives in one place, with permissions-based access ensuring the right team members can find what they need while maintaining compliance.
The last month should focus on logistics and team readiness. Some teams conduct role-playing sessions addressing orthopedic-specific questions:
These questions arise repeatedly at AAOS. Your team needs crisp, evidence-based responses.
The Morial Convention Center in New Orleans is massive, and AAOS uses every bit of it. With the new mobile app featuring turn-by-turn navigation for 2026, your team can navigate more efficiently—but strategic planning is still essential.
Unlike smaller meetings where you might cover everything, AAOS's scale demands prioritization.
We recommend focusing on these key opportunities:
Teams using Health Expert Connect™ can assign coverage efficiently and track it in real time—no more discovering that three team members attended the same session while missing others entirely.
The biggest risk at any major congress is losing valuable insights in the chaos. Health Expert Connect™ provides structured ways to capture and share learning:
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| Session Coverage |
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The AAOS Exhibit Hall is the world's largest orthopedic marketplace. Success requires more than just booth staffing:
Health Expert Connect™ helps coordinate your Exhibit Hall strategy:
Many orthopedic surgeons work at institutions with strict interaction policies. Health Expert Connect™ automates compliance management:
This automation is critical at AAOS, where your team might have dozens of interactions daily across multiple venues.
Beyond the standard playbook, AAOS offers unique venues for meaningful engagement:
This is where having a platform like Health Expert Connect™ really differentiates successful teams. While others scramble with business cards and scattered notes, our users execute systematic follow-up.
Within 24 hours of AAOS ending, you should have:
Then convert these connections into lasting relationships through:
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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 watched talented medical affairs teams—experts who can discuss the latest in robotic surgery or biologics for hours—get completely overwhelmed by AAOS's operational complexity.
The pattern is predictable: Email outreach becomes spreadsheet tracking. Expense reports pile up in another system. Calendars fragment across platforms. Insights scatter across notebooks and napkins. By day three, the team is drowning in logistics instead of building relationships.
We've seen invaluable insights vanish—a conversation with a leading sports medicine surgeon about ACL graft choices, scribbled on a business card, lost in the shuffle. Teams scramble months later to reconstruct Sunshine Act reports because their manual tracking failed.
But the real tragedy is missed connections from poor coordination. An MSL schedules time with a KOL, unaware of an existing relationship. Two team members approach the same surgeon with conflicting messages. Opportunities slip away.
That's why Health Expert Connect™ brings everything together. When your KOL database, communications, schedules, insights, compliance, and expenses live in one platform, your team focuses on what matters: advancing orthopedic care through meaningful relationships.
The transformation is measurable: Instead of 60% administrative burden, teams spend that time in substantive scientific exchange. That efficiency doesn't just save time—it drives your orthopedic programs forward.
AAOS is too important and too expensive to approach haphazardly. The teams that succeed treat congress planning as an integrated process, not disconnected tasks.
Our clients consistently report:
But beyond metrics, what matters is this: when your team focuses on relationships instead of logistics, you achieve the real purpose of congress attendance—advancing your orthopedic pipeline through meaningful KOL engagement.
Don't let another ACC 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 AAD strategy, using real examples from successful cardiology congress campaigns. Because in cardiovascular medicine, 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 dermatology engagements.