APA Takes Step to Reduce Overcrowding of Popular Sessions

APA’s Office of Scientific Programs (SPC) has taken steps to minimize the chance that meeting registrants who want to attend popular sessions will be turned away due to overcrowding.

Using information from last year’s Annual Meeting that yielded 70,000 data points, staff created a model that tries to predict which sessions might have overflow crowds and then assigned sessions to specific rooms based on size. The information was then provided to a new “room and space subcommittee” of the SPC composed of APA members with expertise across the field of psychiatry. This group reviewed the schedule and made manual adjustments to the model. After further analysis was done, sessions on related topics were scheduled in the same geographic area of the Javits Center or Marriott Marquis so that if one session is filled, meeting registrants can attend a nearby session on a related topic.

“We anticipate that these steps should significantly reduce the likelihood of overflow,” said Tristan Gorrindo, M.D., director of APA’s Division of Education, “but in the event that it does happen, we will also have some limited ability to stream select sessions to two overflow theaters at the Javits and one at the Marriott.” ■