Rules for conference season

Fall is in the air. That means it’s conference season again in health IT. I’m at Health 2.0 in San Francisco right now, and I’ll be taking at least two more business trips to the Pacific time zone before Thanksgiving, plus at least one trip east. That means I’ll be seeing a lot of PowerPoint presentations in the near future.

Needless to say, some presentations are better than others. Some are more accurate than others. On my last trip to California back in July, I hit the AMDIS Physician-Computer Connection. There, one slide show contained a fairly serious factual error regarding mergers and acquisitions in the EHR market. I won’t repeat it because I don’t want to spread falsehoods. You could see the shock on the faces of several people in the audience.

An hour or so after that session, I was sitting at a table where one particularly perturbed individual had been earlier. He left the following on a notepad:

Keep this in mind when building your own slide decks this fall!