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So you want a meeting at HIMSS15?

HIMSS15 is less than a month away. The vendor requests for meetings of course have started coming in.

Every year I seem to do fewer and fewer, for several reasons. First off, they’re exhausting. The exhibit hall is huge. This year, it looks like exhibits will fill the entirety of the McCormick Place North Building (705,500 square feet of exhibit space) and South Building (840,000 square feet), and that doesn’t even count the meeting rooms or auditoriums for keynotes. The press room and many of the educational sessions are in the West Building, at least a 15-minute walk from the show floor.

HIMSS says to expect more than 1,200 vendors. I think that’s a conservative estimate, given that there were 1,300 last year and the number seems to grow every year. In any case, that’s a lot of vendors. Remarkably, even as the HIMSS conference has grown over the years, there is only one of me. I can maybe manage 10-12 vendor meetings during the entirety of the conference, so statistically, you have less than a 1 percent chance of snagging one of those spots.

Of course, the more meetings I schedule, the less time I have to do my actual work — you know, the reason why I go to HIMSS every year.

At this point, with my career in a bit of flux, I don’t know yet whom I will be covering HIMSS for. Until I know my assignments, it’s hard to schedule meetings. Please bear with me.

I notice others have recently expressed similar concerns about their own scheduling. For years, I’ve had a “Rule No. 1” for people attending HIMSS for the first time: Wear comfortable shoes. The people at HIMSS have caught on. “Don’t forget to wear your comfortable shoes!” reads the main Exhibition page on the HIMSS Conference site this year.

Joe Goedert at Health Data Management wrote a nice piece last month with “Tips for Meeting with Reporters at HIMSS15.” Among his advice: Give us the biggest news, not your entire media kit/life story; bring customers, not marketing managers; understand and respect our knowledge and get to the point rather than giving health IT reporters background on the HITECH Act; avoid buzzwords; and respect the reporter’s preference of meeting in either the press room or exhibit hall.

Personally, I hate the exhibit hall. It takes forever to get anywhere, and I don’t need to be stopped every 50 feet for a carnival barker or “booth babe” to ask me to enter to win an iPad in exchange for adding my business card to a marketing list. I’m not your target customer.

I would add to Joe’s list the fact that there is a lot more to HIMSS than just the “show.” There are more than 300 educational sessions, many of which are better uses of my time than a product update. It’s astounding how many vendor reps I speak to each year who haven’t left the exhibit hall all week.

Hopefully I’ll have the coverage question resolved in the next week or two. As for the other issues, well, that’s up to you.

March 13, 2015 I Written By

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality fast $5000 loans-cash.net with bad credit, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.

RIP, Mitochon Systems?

I’m not sure if this got reported anywhere, because I couldn’t find anything online, but the following message is on the home page of free EHR vendor Mitochon Systems:

Mitochon message

The company hasn’t posted any news releases online since March 4, which was during HIMSS13. No tweets have been posted since Feb. 11, which is also the last time the company updated its little-used Facebook page. I guess we can safely say the winnowing of the ambulatory EHR market has begun.

 

 

August 6, 2013 I Written By

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality fast $5000 loans-cash.net with bad credit, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.

Hotels open up for HIMSS13

Here’s a quick travel update for those of you still making plans for HIMSS13 in New Orleans next month. Today, OnPeak, the travel service that HIMSS has contracted with, seems to have released a number of hotel rooms for the week of the conference.

I had been waiting to book for a few weeks since I first heard that rooms would open on Jan. 30 or so after vendors, which apparently claimed big blocks of rooms months ago, had to give their final numbers. That didn’t happen, and I was starting to sweat a bit. But I made my reservation today, and am near enough to the Morial Convention Center that I don’t have to worry if I miss the last shuttle of the evening, which I’ve done plenty of times in past years. I feel bad for anyone staying out by the airport in Metairie or Kenner, because that’s a good 10-13 miles away. From my experience in other HIMSS cities, those bus trips can easily take 45 minutes to an hour during rush hour, and the buses don’t run all that frequently. HIMSS won’t be going back to San Diego anytime soon because so many people had to stay out by La Jolla the last time the conference was there in 2006, and that is closer to the San Diego Convention Center than the airport hotels are in New Orleans.

Back then,  seven years ago, attendance had swelled to a then-record 25,000, and stayed in that range for a couple of years. But then came the HITECH Act and meaningful use in 2009, and interest in health IT has soared. Last year, more than 37,000 people came to HIMSS12 in Las Vegas, where hotels are plentiful. The Big Easy might not be as big a draw as Sin City, but it might be for some people who prefer authentic culture to the manufactured kind. (For the record, I like both places.) I’ve heard registration was slower this year than last, but I didn’t get that directly from HIMSS.

If you do find yourself stuck, I did notice in the last couple of weeks that there are a good number of hotels with vacancies across the Mississippi River in Gretna and Marrero and points east, such as Chalmette and New Orleans East. But there is no HIMSS shuttle to those places, and good luck finding a car to rent unless you’re willing to spend $90 a day. Go ahead, search for a car rental with airport pickup and try to find one for less during the week of March 3. (You can get one from an off-airport location for about $31 a day if you’re willing to take a taxi into town first to pick it up.)

This leads me to wonder if this might be the last time for a while that HIMSS meets in New Orleans. I think a couple of extra shuttle routes could fix the problem. And if attendance does level off or even drop a bit since we’ve probably passed the peak of the Gartner Hype Cycle, then it’s all good. Given some of the recent pushback against the direction of meaningful use and the efficacy of current EHR technology, I think it’s safe to say we are in or headed to the trough of disillusionment this year.

I’ll have more later this week about HIMSS, including what I’m trying to get from the conference. Vendors, please pay attention. I’m finally about to start working on my schedule, but I will have specific objectives.

 

February 11, 2013 I Written By

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality fast $5000 loans-cash.net with bad credit, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.

A question for vendors

I know it’s a big deal to be named to the “Best In KLAS” list by KLAS Research, but does it really do any good for everyone on the list, which ranks an astounding 113 market segments, to send out a press release touting that? Put yourself in my shoes. How would you like to receive dozens of e-mails about the same report? Just curious.

December 27, 2010 I Written By

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality fast $5000 loans-cash.net with bad credit, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.