IDWeek 2026 Recap: Care Gaps and Value of Collaboration

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IDWeek 2026, held from October 21–24 in Washington, DC, highlighted major areas in need of improvement, previous advancements made in the space, and education gaps for clinicians and policymakers to help improve care access and patient outcomes.

The meeting covered a broad spectrum of nuanced issues within infectious disease care, spanning measles in pregnancy, managing and preventing Clostridioides difficile infection in patients, a potential functional cure for hepatitis B, and long-acting injectables for HIV prevention. Although these are only a few of the topics touched on at the meeting, they exemplify the vast scope of infectious disease and the breadth of what the meeting covered.

Many clinicians said it's important to attend meetings such as these because they bring together people who are otherwise siloed in their fields.

“I think what's really novel about this space is bringing all those people together to be able to discuss a problem such as, how can we improve scalability and barriers to long-acting injectable prevention?” Aditi Ramakrishnan, MD, MSc, assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said in an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care^® (AJMC^®).

“This is a place where we have a breadth of expertise,” said Senu Apewokin, MD, associate professor of clinical medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, noting that the meeting draws patients, policymakers, advocates, researchers, and public health officials.

“There are so many different people coming together to look at a common problem, so they're bringing broad perspectives,” he told AJMC. “And I think that a conference like this presents a platform where we can consider all these perspectives and come up with the best solutions or strategies to deal [with] the problem.”

It's also where “groundbreaking science” is occurring, and it brings together interdisciplinary groups of people who all share the same goal: “protecting our health,” Naima T. Joseph, MD, MPH, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and medical director of equity and pregnancy at Boston Medical Center, said in an interview with AJMC.

IDWeek also falls just weeks before The Liver Meeting, held November 5–9 in Denver, Colorado. Because the major infectious disease and liver meetings come one after the other, clinicians can watch research, including phase 2 and phase 3 trial results, advance from one conference to the next, Jordan Feld, MD, MPH, professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and section head of hepatology at University Health Network, said in an interview with AJMC. He pointed to hepatitis B as one area where those advances are happening quickly.

“Being at meetings like this is where you learn what's new, the cutting edge, what's on the cusp, and also get a perspective of what's coming down the pipeline so that you are making sure that your patients are ready, that your clinic is ready,” he said.