This past week we attended one of two major surgical conventions, the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, this year held in Philadelphia.
As usual, we setup our booth on the show floor, to advertise and sell our videos and books.
The most satisfying events during these 3 days are when our customers and business partners say hello, offer praise and extend invitations to explore new business endeavours.
Here are a few example:
Doctor A - wearing Naval uniform: I take your penetrating trauma textbook with me whenever I am deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. It and the video CD are invaluable.
This is great to hear, that videos I shot and a book I helped to create are used to help save the lives of our brave soldiers and presumably the local citizens in war zones. Regardless of one's opinion about the war itself, soldiers who are volunteers do their assigned jobs and deserve the very best medical care.
It was also interesting hearing about the non-trauma surgery that goes on. In any population of 100,000+ people there are going to be gallbladder, appendix and hernia surgeries.
Another comment from a prestigous surgeon was "The quality of the books Cine-Med publishes is fantastic. We should talk about some ideas I have." While comments like this are nice to hear, and they do not always result in a profitable product, the potential is there, and potential offered by a prospect is the key to developing new business.
A final conversation was with a current client, who introduced me to one of his associates at another company, saying "If you need such and such a video made, call this guy. He does amazing work." Aw shucks!
Some other interesting experiences:
1. Visiting the Sony Medical booth, with a hands on demo of the PMW-EX1. More on this in a future post.
2. In the learning center, which showcases simulation and surgical training technologies, is a group experimenting with surgical ergonomics. They use body and eye tracking to measure the effectiveness of surgical skills. A device measures hand tremor and hesitation. They also use multiple video projectors registered onto one screen to increase the resolution of surgical video in the OR.
3. Another surgeon uses guitar hero and other video games to develop hand-eye coordination in surgeons. See Mom, all those hours spent on my intellivision have paid off!
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