This year has brought unimaginable challenges and stressors to the CHEST community, and while the CHEST Annual Meeting has decided to go virtual for the safety of all parties, what won’t change is the exceptional high quality and interactive experience attendees have come to expect from the meeting.

“This year, we’ve faced new challenges planning the meeting with the COVID-19 pandemic, but we’re up to them,” said CHEST 2020 Program Chair Victor Test, MD, FCCP. “We’re going to have an engaging and immersive meeting that retains the flavor of CHEST, with easy-to-access, unparalleled education.”

The virtual event will kick off on Sunday, October 18, and conclude on Wednesday, October 21, featuring dozens of live sessions and more than 100 additional on-demand sessions. All content will be accessible until January 18, 2021. Attendees will have the opportunity to reconnect with colleagues, interact with world-renowned experts during live Q&As, learn via simulation, and play and compete with CHEST Games like never before—all from the convenience of your home or institution. Visit chestmeeting.chestnet.org for all up-to-date CHEST 2020 meeting information.

The meeting has something for everyone, Dr. Test explained, with a variety of tracks, trainee-focused opportunities, team-based sessions, and bite-sized learning to accommodate your schedule. You can filter content by disease state, prerecorded or live sessions, and by length of presentation—all benefits of virtual learning.

“There’s a variable smorgasbord of awesome content for people to view,” he said. “A few advantages to being virtual is that in the end, most of it will be available to review at a later date if you missed something, and you can switch back and forth between sessions without having to physically relocate. This will also enable us to have real-time interaction during the sessions through the chat format and enable a wider group of people to interact with the speakers and the moderators of each session for more of a back-and-forth than we’d be able to do at a live meeting.”

CHEST staff has been working hard to transform the CHEST Games into a highly personalized and social digital environment where members can continuously test their knowledge and compete with their peers. There will even be live competition during the meeting, in addition to the popular CHEST Challenge Championship on Tuesday evening that has gone virtual.

Crucial and quickly evolving information on COVID-19 will be front and center of the meeting, Dr. Test said, addressing all aspects that come with it: treatment in the ICU and post-ICU recovery, including complications and practice management, updated drug trials and immunizations, control of pandemics, immunology of viruses, and how to manage burnout. Anthony S. Fauci, MD, the national leading voice in the pandemic, and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), will be the keynote speaker on Sunday, October 18, from 8:45 am to 9:45 am CT.

“CHEST leadership and the CHEST Foundation are all very grateful and appreciative of the effort all of our health-care workers are putting forth to help the country deal with this challenge,” Dr. Test said. “CHEST is ensuring there are resources available to help maintain our mental health and our ability to respond to the challenges. This meeting will give information to help you, and at the same time, provide an outlet to relax and enhance your satisfaction of a job well done.”

CHEST recognizes that the ICUs, during COVID-19 and other critical care infections, are run by the entire critical care team—physicians, pulmonologists, cardiologists, respiratory therapists, physician assistants, nurses, advanced practice providers, and more. The meeting features sessions on all perspectives of the care team and diversity.

“We have continued to focus on very diverse faculty in addressing racial and gender-based disparities in health care and, in particular, pulmonary and critical care,” he said.

Dr. Test expects ground-breaking research reports in sepsis as well as a variety of different topics on COVID-19. The virtual platform will include five channels that focus on different themes: pulmonary, critical care, sleep, original research, and special programs, including honor and memorial lectures, which recognize ground-breaking figures in pulmonary medicine, and this year is no different.

It is more important than ever to stay up to date on developments in health and medicine, but CHEST is putting equal weight on ensuring the experience of CHEST 2020 is a respite from the mental and physical exhaustion our community is experiencing during these unprecedented times.

“We’re really looking forward to CHEST 2020,” Dr. Test said. “We’re going to present high-level content in such a unique way and enable you to interact with CHEST members like you’ve never before. It really is a can’t-miss opportunity for you. Everyone at CHEST is working overtime to make this meeting as friendly and easy as possible. We hope to see you there!”