Micepad × EuroAsia: 6x Attendance Growth on a Hybrid Event Platform

EuroAsia is the annual flagship event hosted by three medical societies: the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM), the Taiwan Society of Critical Care Medicine (TSCCM), and the Taiwan Society of Emergency & Critical Care Medicine (TSECCM). Together, they advance knowledge in intensive care medicine through education, research and professional development.

The EuroAsia conference is a critical educational and professional development event for intensive care and emergency medicine practitioners across Europe and Asia. Featuring internationally recognised speakers, live case discussions, and research presentations, it serves as a meeting point for a discipline where knowledge exchange directly impacts patient outcomes. The stakes of delivering a high-quality conference experience are therefore higher than in most industries.

When COVID-19 disrupted international travel in 2020, the three organizing societies faced a decision that many conference organizers around the world were confronting simultaneously: postpone indefinitely, cancel, or find a way to continue. Their choice - to transform EuroAsia into a hybrid event platform experience - set the template for how medical conferences could continue to serve their communities even when travel was impossible.

In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, foreign delegates could not travel to Taiwan to attend EuroAsia, resulting in the event being postponed for 6 months. With a greater need for upskilling medical professionals in the current climate, a solution for event continuity was more critical than ever.

The challenge was not simply finding a video streaming solution. Medical conferences operate with a complex programme structure - multiple concurrent rooms, speakers presenting from different locations, and an audience that expects to move between sessions based on their clinical interests. A basic webinar platform would reduce EuroAsia to a linear broadcast, destroying the conference's value as an interactive, multi-track learning environment.

Engagement was equally critical. Medical professionals attend conferences not just to watch presentations but to interrogate ideas - to ask challenging questions of researchers, to challenge assumptions, and to share clinical insights with peers. A hybrid event platform that did not support real-time Q&A and discussion would fail to deliver the intellectual exchange that defines a high-quality medical conference. The three societies needed a solution that preserved both the structure and the interactivity of the in-person event.

The three societies decided to transform EuroAsia into a hybrid event and approached Micepad for expertise. Micepad's software gave them the opportunity to host an in-person event, livestreamed to medical professionals worldwide. The platform allowed attendees to use laptops and mobile devices to watch live streams and switch between conference rooms at any time, while raising questions on the platform to increase engagement.

Micepad's hybrid event platform was configured to replicate the multi-room conference structure in a digital environment. Each conference room was set up as a separate live stream within the platform, with in-person attendees in Taiwan and remote attendees worldwide accessing the same content simultaneously. Remote attendees could switch between rooms freely - exactly as an in-person delegate would walk between sessions - without needing to leave the platform.

Real-time Q&A was enabled across all sessions, allowing both in-person and remote attendees to submit questions to speakers through the same interface. Moderators managed the queue from a central control panel, surfacing questions from the combined pool without revealing whether they came from a delegate in the room or one joining from Europe or Southeast Asia. This created a genuinely unified conference experience rather than a two-tier system where remote attendees felt like passive viewers.

The platform was designed for accessibility across device types. Medical professionals joining from hospitals or home offices used laptops, while some attendees preferred to follow sessions on mobile devices. Micepad's responsive design ensured full functionality across both, with no degradation in streaming quality or Q&A usability on smaller screens.

The transformation from an in-person to a hybrid event was a huge success. Compared to the previous year, there was a 6x increase in attendance rate, with 3,800+ attendees joining from around the world. Attendees from abroad were able to participate online during the pandemic, creating what the organisers described as 'a very good hybrid conference experience with Micepad.'

The 6x attendance growth was the most striking headline outcome - but equally significant was the geographic expansion it represented. EuroAsia had always aspired to be a truly Euro-Asian conference, but practical travel barriers meant that European delegates attending in-person was rare. With the hybrid event platform, medical professionals from ESICM member institutions across Europe could participate fully in a conference that had historically been geographically out of reach.

Tony Yu-Chang Yeh, Chair of Scientific Affairs, noted that the hybrid format created new possibilities for the conference that the organising societies intend to carry forward. The ability to reach a global audience without compromising on the quality of the scientific exchange has permanently expanded what EuroAsia can offer to the intensive care medicine community.

The implementation of Micepad's hybrid event platform for EuroAsia began with a detailed technical assessment of the Taiwan venue's network infrastructure and the streaming quality requirements for a medical conference. High-definition video was essential - medical presentations often include clinical imagery and data visualizations that require sharp resolution to be interpretable by remote viewers.

Multi-room streaming was configured with dedicated encoder setups for each conference room, with automatic failover settings to maintain stream continuity in the event of a hardware issue. Remote attendee registration was handled through the platform, with unique access credentials distributed to all ticket holders ahead of the event. The platform's capacity was validated through load testing ahead of the live event to ensure it could sustain the anticipated attendance peak.

Micepad worked with the EuroAsia scientific committee to configure the Q&A moderation workflow appropriate for a medical conference - where the accuracy and relevance of questions displayed to speakers carries professional significance. Moderators had full control over the order and selection of questions shown, with the ability to hold submissions for review before they appeared on-screen.