As important as the venue and the menu are, they're secondary to the content.

For me to watch those young kids light up those are truly things that are just priceless.

We know that great content, great speakers, and a venue that's a draw for physicians are all important factors for dinner meetings. But very little is known about how physicians decide which dinner meetings to attend. We need more specific demographic data to help us figure out what it is the doctors want in a dinner meeting and how to give it to them in the most efficient manner.

For a series of meetings, if you can reduce the no-show factor by even 1 percent, that can make a significant difference. If you're running a series of 100 dinner meetings and you can get even one more doctor to each one of them, then you've touched 100 more physicians. That has a lot of impact. Even a minimal decrease in the no-show factor can pay volumes in dividends for years to come — if, for example, those 100 doctors were to change their prescribing habits based on what they learned.

When the guidelines say 'moderate by local standards,' you know that's different from Billings, Montana, to New York City, so the companies do find room for interpretation. The menus haven't changed a great deal. It's just that wine and other alcoholic beverages aren't served, and the hors d'oeuvres are not as lavish. But these days that has as much to do with budgetary constraints as compliance issues.

A lot of pharmaceutical companies have hired compliance managers to make sure that all aspects of a meeting are compliant. In many cases, a company's internal guidelines are even more stringent than those of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Food & Drug Administration, and Office of Inspector General.