In case your time is short:
ASN Kidney Week 2025 (November 5-9 in Houston) brings together thousands of nephrologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals—making it the world's premier nephrology meeting. Success at this massive event requires more than just showing up. Here's how to maximize your impact:
Step 1: Start planning now
With 13,000+ attendees and hundreds of concurrent sessions, your outreach should begin 4-5 months before the event. Segment your nephrology KOLs by subspecialty (transplant, dialysis, CKD management, etc.) and start personalized invitations this summer.
Step 2: Consider how best to navigate the unique Kidney Week ecosystem
Unlike smaller specialty meetings, ASN features distinct tracks for basic science, clinical practice, and health policy. Map your team's presence across these domains strategically ahead of time so you can make the most of the event.
Step 3: Plan to leverage the ASN Communities platform
This year's enhanced digital component will allow pre-meeting connections and post-meeting follow-up through ASN's proprietary platform. Make sure to integrate this with your existing outreach strategy.
Step 4: Focus on the transplant symposiums
With new organ allocation policies and novel immunosuppression protocols, the transplant sessions will be particularly high-value for KOL engagement.
Step 5: Plan for poster madness
The rapid-fire poster sessions unique to Kidney Week require QR codes and digital capture tools to gather insights from hundreds of presentations efficiently.
Teams using ExtendMed's Health Expert Connect™ platform report 3x more meaningful KOL connections at events like Kidney Week compared to manual approaches. Contact us to see how we can elevate your ASN meeting strategy—we’re happy to give you a free personalized demo to see if it’s a fit.
Let’s be honest—Kidney Week can be overwhelming. We’ve been helping pharmaceutical companies navigate medical congresses for years, and ASN's annual meeting is unique. Where ASCO might draw 40,000 oncologists with relatively similar interests, Kidney Week brings together 13,000+ professionals spanning everything from basic science researchers studying podocyte biology to transplant surgeons managing complex immunosuppression protocols to health policy experts reshaping dialysis reimbursement.
The sheer diversity of stakeholders makes 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 20 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 Kidney Week and show how an engagement platform can help you maximize the ROI on events like this.
Understanding Kidney Week
First, let's talk about what makes ASN different from other major congresses. The nephrology community is remarkably interconnected—many of these physicians have trained together, collaborated on research, or serve on the same committees.
This creates both opportunities and challenges for engagement.
Unlike some specialties where KOLs might primarily stay within their academic centers, nephrologists frequently wear multiple hats. Your target transplant nephrologist might also run a CKD clinic, participate in dialysis quality improvement initiatives, and conduct basic science research. This means you need to think beyond simple categorization when planning your outreach.
This is where Health Expert Connect™ becomes invaluable. Our platform allows teams to tag each KOL with multiple attributes—clinical focus, research interests, institutional affiliations, past engagement history—and then create dynamic segments for targeted outreach. No more managing separate spreadsheets for "transplant docs" and "CKD specialists" when the same person might be 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. ASN organizes content across several domains:
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We point this out because each domain has its own thought leaders, session formats, and networking opportunities. So, your strategy needs to account for this segmentation while remaining flexible enough to capture cross-domain insights.
Pre-meeting strategy: the 5-month countdown
Based on our experience supporting multiple Kidney Week campaigns, here's when to start each planning phase. This, of course, can certainly be compressed into a shorter timeline. The monthly milestones represent the most “comfortable” and proactive cadence.
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Health Expert Connect™ includes team collaboration features that keep everyone aligned:
Maximizing on-site engagement
The George R. Brown Convention Center sprawls across 1.9 million square feet. Here are a few tips for navigating it efficiently.
Cover sessions strategically
Unlike smaller meetings where you might cover everything, Kidney Week demands choices. We recommend considering a few of the most critical areas at the event (listed below.) Teams that use Health Expert Connect™ get a convenient way to assign team members to specific sessions and track coverage in real time.
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Capture insights systematically—not ad hoc
The biggest risk at any major congress is losing valuable insights in the chaos. Health Expert Connect™ provides structured ways to capture and organize what you learn:
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| Session Coverage |
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Be ready for a deluge of quick poster sessions
Kidney Week's rapid-fire poster presentations—where authors get just 90 seconds to present—sometimes require a bit of a different approach than traditional poster sessions. You can't have lengthy discussions at each poster.
Health Expert Connect™ helps teams tackle this through:
- Pre-meeting preparation: Upload abstract numbers and assign team coverage.
- Rapid capture tools: Quick forms for capturing presenter contact info and key insights.
- Follow-up automation: Systematic process for scheduling deeper conversations post-congress.
- Team coordination: Real-time updates on which posters have been covered
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We recommend game-planning with your event team ahead of time to deploy team members strategically to cover multiple concurrent sessions. Give everyone their poster assignments to cover as much ground as possible rather than moving as a big group and seeing only a fraction of what you ought to be engaging with. |
We've seen teams capture 3x more meaningful poster insights using our systematic approach compared to traditional note-taking methods.
Track compliance more accurately and conveniently
Many nephrologists work at institutions with strict interaction policies. Health Expert Connect™ automatically manages every dimension of compliance:
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This is critical at Kidney Week, where you might have dozens of team members engaging hundreds of KOLs across multiple venues. Manually tracking compliance simply doesn't scale.
Nephrology-specific engagement opportunities
Beyond the standard congress playbook, Kidney Week offers unique engagement venues, including the Kidney Health Initiative (KHI) Sessions. If you're developing devices or combination products, these FDA-partnership sessions are invaluable. KHI brings together regulators, clinicians, and industry to discuss regulatory pathways specific to nephrology innovations.
Other engagement opportunities include:
- Global Kidney Health Atlas Launch — ASN often unveils major epidemiological data during Kidney Week. Attending these sessions positions you as committed to addressing global kidney disease burden—not just selling products.
- Trainee Events — Don't overlook fellows and early-career nephrologists. The "Fellows Corner" and career development sessions attract future thought leaders. These smaller, more intimate settings often yield surprisingly candid insights about practice challenges and unmet needs.
- Regional Society Meetings — Many state and regional nephrology societies hold meetings adjacent to Kidney Week. These offer more focused engagement opportunities with geographically important KOLs.
Post-Kidney Week 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—a huge pain point for those without a system. Within 24 hours of Kidney Week 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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Why an integrated platform matters at Kidney Week
We’ve watched brilliant medical affairs teams—people who could discuss the latest in transplant immunology or CKD-MBD management for hours—get completely overwhelmed by the operational complexity of a major congress.
Here's the typical pattern: They start with email for outreach, move to spreadsheets for tracking responses, use a separate system for expense management, maybe a different calendar tool for scheduling, and then try to capture insights in yet another system. By day two of an event like Kidney Week, they're drowning in administrative chaos instead of focusing on what matters—building relationships with nephrologists who could advance their programs.
We’ve seen teams lose incredibly valuable insights simply because there was no central capture method. Someone has an amazing conversation with a leading transplant nephrologist about novel immunosuppression protocols, scribbles notes on a business card, and then can't find it three days later. Or worse, they remember the conversation but can't recall which specific KOL shared which insight, so they can't follow up appropriately.
The compliance risks are real too. When you're manually tracking expenses across multiple team members engaging hundreds of KOLs, mistakes happen. We’ve heard of teams scrambling to reconstruct spending records months later for Sunshine Act reporting because their manual tracking failed.
But what really breaks our heart is the missed opportunities from poor team coordination. One MSL schedules a meeting with a KOL, not knowing that a colleague from medical affairs already has a relationship with that person. Or worse, two team members approach the same nephrologist with conflicting asks because there's no central system tracking interactions.
This is exactly why we built Health Expert Connect™ differently. When everything lives in one platform—your KOL database, communication history, meeting schedules, insight capture, compliance tracking, expense management—your team can focus on what they do best: advancing medicine through meaningful relationships with nephrologists.
The difference is transformational:
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Instead of spending 60% of their time on administrative coordination, teams spend that time having deeper conversations, capturing better insights, and building stronger relationships. That's not just more efficient—it's what actually moves your nephrology programs forward. |
The bottom line: You deserve a systematic approach to congress success
Kidney Week 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.
Health Expert Connect™ provides the infrastructure for this systematic approach:
- Before Kidney Week: Organized KOL management and targeted outreach.
- During Kidney Week: Coordinated team execution and systematic insight capture.
- After Kidney Week: Systematic follow-up that builds lasting relationships.
Our clients consistently report:
- More meaningful KOL interactions through systematic planning.
- A reduction in administrative burden through integrated workflows.
- Total compliance accuracy through automated tracking.
Significantly higher ROI through systematic follow-up.
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 nephrology pipeline through meaningful KOL engagement.
Ready to transform your Kidney Week strategy?
Don't let another Kidney Week 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 Kidney Week strategy, using real examples from successful nephrology congress campaigns. Because in nephrology, 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 nephrology engagements.
