HIMSS back in Chicago, as is ignorance about health IT
According to the Chicago Tribune, HIMSS will join with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley Monday morning to announce that the organization will put the Windy City back in its rotation for its massive annual conference.
As you may recall, Chicago-based HIMSS pulled its 2012 event from its hometown, citing high labor and materials costs for vendors at the McCormick Place convention center. Instead, HIMSS12 will be held in Las Vegas.
The conference has outgrown smaller venues in places like San Diego and Dallas, and only five cities currently have enough exhibit space and hotel rooms to accommodate the 27,000 attendees and more than 900 exhibitors: Chicago, Las Vegas, Orlando, Fla. (host of HIMSS11), Atlanta and New Orleans. I understand the conference won’t return to New Orleans for a while because there aren’t enough service workers in that hurricane-ravaged city. If you attended HIMSS07 in the Big Easy, you probably remember long waits at understaffed restaurants.
If you clicked on the above link to the Tribune story, you may have noticed that the paper calls the conference a “medical” meeting. At the risk of sounding nitpicky, I need to know why people outside healthcare can’t distinguish between the industry of healthcare and the practice of medicine. Health IT is a tool to support medicine, but it’s not medicine in and of itself. HIMSS is a healthcare event. It’s a technology event. It’s not a medical meeting.
UPDATE: The 2015 and 2019 HIMSS conferences will be held at Chicago’s McCormick Place.
Yes, I remember HIMSS '07 and there were sooooo many problems in New Orleans. Beyond restaurants, many of the hotels did not get sufficient renovations after the hurricane damage and were downright gross! Hopefully it's better now, but understand why HIMSS is concerned about going back.Although Orlando isn't the most exciting city to visit on business, the weather is nice/mild and the costs are low compared to other cities. I do think it's important for the HIMSS organization, exhibitors and attendees to be mindful of costs for the event because those costs get passed along and our collective goal should be to reduce health care costs.
Definitely interesting that they're heading back to Chicago. Although, it makes sense that they would try since they're a Chicago based organization. I still think Orlando or Las Vegas should be the 2 destinations for it. They have what you need for an event this large. Not to mention the warmer weather.
[…] and the City of Chicago enacted a set of new work rules for McCormick Place last year, which prompted HIMSS and a few other large events to sign contracts to […]
[…] For one thing, the mega-health IT conference in Las Vegas is not at the massive Las Vegas Convention Center, but rather at the Sands Expo Convention Center and the adjacent Venetian hotel. Remember, the 2012 HIMSS conference was supposed to be in Chicago, but the organization switched it to Sin City a couple years ago after vendors complained about high costs at Chicago’s McCormick Place for HIMSS09. (The defection of HIMSS and one other large trade show actually prompted the Illinois General Assembly to legislate changes to some of the work rules at McCormick Place, after which HIMSS agreed to hold its 2015 and 2019 conferences there.) […]