HCEA Issues New Poster Guidelines

Michael Hart -- Tradeshow Week, 9/2/2008 2:32:00 PM

The Healthcare Convention & Exhibitors Assn. has released an update on guidelines for scientific exhibits and poster displays – and the good news is it has absolutely nothing to do with new regulations on health care marketing.

“Oh, no,” said Karen Kingston, vice president of the HCEA board and convention and meetings manager for B. Braun Medical. “This has nothing to do with legislation or regulatory issues. This document just supplies more relevant material. The old guidelines were outdated.”

The revised version of “Guidelines for Scientific Exhibits and Poster Displays: Application, Production and Presentation” includes new information about how to handle electronic poster presentations, an alternative to traditional displays that is being used in more and more educational formats at health care meetings.

At the same time, new guidelines distinguish between tabletop poster and conventional poster displays.
A complete list of the new guidelines can be downloaded from http://hcea.org.

The new guidelines do include a reminder that any statements or procedures that digress from recognized standards must indicate that they require approval from the Food and Drug Administration, or at least a disclaimer about pending approval.

In recent months, there have been a number of developments involving both actions by various levels of government and revisions to the PhRMA Code that could drastically change the ways in which pharmaceutical and medical device makers can market their products to physicians, so many that health care show exhibitors have become wary of any news involving changes to guidelines.

That, however, is not the case here, Kingston said. 

“This shouldn’t put any kind of chill on posters after the new (PhRMA) rules go into effect,” she added.