Preparing for ACC.26: A Playbook for Maximizing KOL Engagement at Cardiology's Premier Meeting

We've been helping pharma companies (and their partners) navigate medical congresses for years, and ACC's Annual Scientific Session presents unique opportunities and challenges for teams looking to connect with cardiovascular thought leaders.

Where other meetings might have narrower focuses, ACC brings together peers from around the world to explore the latest advances in cardiovascular medicine and gain practical insights to improve daily practice—from interventional cardiologists performing complex PCI procedures to electrophysiologists managing arrhythmias and heart failure specialists implementing novel therapies.

The diversity of stakeholders means you have to think strategically going into an event like this. 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 session tracks happening simultaneously in the expansive Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

This is exactly why we built Health Expert Connect™: to help teams manage this complexity without getting overwhelmed by spreadsheets, emails, and compliance concerns. In this guide, we'll share our playbook for ACC and show how an engagement platform can help you maximize the ROI on events like this.

Inside the ACC Annual Meeting

Before diving into strategy, it's worth understanding what makes ACC unique from other major medical meetings.

The cardiology community is notably collaborative yet highly specialized. Many cardiologists have trained at the same fellowship programs, collaborate on multicenter trials, or serve together on guideline committees developing treatment recommendations. This creates both opportunities and challenges for engagement.

Unlike some specialties, cardiologists often practice across multiple domains. Your target interventional cardiologist might also perform structural heart procedures, conduct clinical trials, and teach fellows. This means simple categorization won't work—your outreach strategy needs to reflect the full scope of each KOL's expertise and interests.

This is exactly where platforms like Health Expert Connect™ become invaluable for congresses like ACC. Our system lets teams tag KOLs with multiple attributes (like clinical focus, procedural expertise, research interests, institutional affiliations, engagement history) and build dynamic segments for more targeted outreach.

There's no more juggling separate spreadsheets for "TAVR experts" vs. "complex PCI specialists" 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. ACC organizes its content across several key domains:

• Interventional Cardiology: Complex PCI, chronic total occlusions, and intravascular imaging
• Structural Heart: TAVR, mitral interventions, and left atrial appendage closure
• Electrophysiology: Ablation techniques, device therapy, and arrhythmia management
• Heart Failure & Cardiomyopathies: Novel therapies, device management, and transplantation
• Prevention & Lipid Management: Risk assessment, lifestyle interventions, and novel lipid therapies
• Imaging: Advanced echocardiography, cardiac CT/MRI, and multimodality approaches.

Each of these domains has its own thought leaders, session formats, and networking opportunities.

A smart engagement strategy needs to reflect this segmentation while staying flexible enough to capture valuable cross-domain insights.

Pre-meeting strategy: the 5-month playbook

Over the years supporting congress campaigns, we've 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.

Maximizing on-site engagement at ACC

The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans spans multiple halls and levels. Navigating it effectively takes planning.

Here are some tips to help your team make the most of their time on site.

Cover your sessions strategically

Unlike smaller meetings where you can cover everything, ACC forces you to prioritize. We recommend focusing on key areas. Teams using Health Expert Connect™ easily assign session coverage and track it in real time—no more last-minute scrambles.

Capture insights systematically (not ad hoc)

One of the biggest risks at a large congress like ACC is losing valuable insights in the shuffle. Health Expert Connect™ gives teams structured, consistent ways to capture and share what they learn:

Navigate the poster sessions efficiently

ACC's poster sessions—spanning everything from basic science to clinical outcomes—require an organized approach. Your team needs tools to capture insights quickly and thoroughly.

Health Expert Connect™ helps teams tackle this through:

1. Pre-meeting preparation: Upload abstract numbers and assign team coverage.
2. Rapid capture tools: Quick forms for capturing presenter contact info and key insights.
3. Follow-up automation: Systematic process for scheduling deeper conversations post-congress.
4. Team coordination: Real-time updates on which posters have been covered.

We strongly recommend mapping out your poster strategy ahead of time. Divide the team so you're covering as many relevant sessions as possible, rather than having everyone cluster around the same handful of presentations.

We've seen teams capture 3x more meaningful poster insights using this systematic approach compared to traditional note-taking.

Track compliance accurately (and without the headaches)

Many cardiologists work at academic medical centers with strict policies regarding industry interactions. Manual compliance tracking doesn't scale at a meeting like ACC, where your team may have dozens of members engaging with hundreds of KOLs across multiple venues.

Health Expert Connect™ automates compliance management:

• Institutional spending tracking across your entire team's interactions.
• Payment processing with built-in compliance workflows.
• Expense reporting that handles Sunshine Act requirements.
• Contract management for all KOL engagements.

At an event as complex as ACC, this kind of automation is critical. Without it, teams quickly get buried trying to manually track compliance across a mountain of interactions.

Cardiology-specific engagement opportunities

Beyond the standard congress playbook, ACC offers unique engagement venues, including:

• The Heart Valve Collaboratory — This dedicated space for structural heart discussions offers intimate settings for engaging with interventional cardiologists and cardiac surgeons focused on valve therapies. Particularly valuable for companies with TAVR, mitral, or tricuspid technologies.
  
  
• The Innovation Pavilion — This hub for emerging cardiovascular technologies and digital health solutions attracts forward-thinking cardiologists eager to transform patient care. It's particularly valuable for companies with novel devices or AI-driven solutions.
  
  
• Fellows-in-Training (FIT) Program — Don't overlook the next generation of cardiology leaders! These sessions attract ambitious early-career cardiologists eager to learn about the latest advances. The smaller settings often yield candid insights about training gaps and unmet clinical needs.
  
  
• Subspecialty Council Meetings — Many cardiology subspecialty groups hold meetings adjacent to ACC. The Heart Rhythm Society, Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI), and others offer focused engagement opportunities with specialized KOLs.
  
  
• ACC.26@Home Virtual Component — For those who can't make it to New Orleans, ACC offers virtual streaming of late-breaking science, expanding your potential reach to KOLs who may not attend in person.

Post-ACC follow-up

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 concludes on Monday, March 30 at 5:30 p.m. CT following the Closing Ceremony—a huge pain point for those without a system.

Within 24 hours of ACC ending, you'll have:

Then we move to actually turning those connections from the event into lasting relationships.

Here's how we do it—in sequence:

Why an integrated platform matters at ACC

We've seen brilliant medical affairs teams—people who can discuss the latest in transcatheter therapies or novel anticoagulation strategies for hours—get completely bogged down by the operational chaos of a major congress.

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 ACC, the team is overwhelmed with administrative work instead of focusing on what really matters—building relationships with cardiologists 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 interventional cardiologist about intravascular imaging approaches, 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 cardiologist 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 cardiovascular medicine through meaningful relationships.

The difference 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 cardiology programs forward.

The bottom line: you deserve a systematic approach to congress success

ACC 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.

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 cardiovascular pipeline through meaningful KOL engagement.

Ready to transform your AAD strategy for 2026?

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.