As the HIMSS Trade Show Changes Hands, I Can’t Help But Shrug

Most of my healthcare technology network has spent the past few days speculating on the impact of the proposed sale of the HIMSS trade show to Informa. This isn’t surprising. I met most of these folks in person for the first time at HIMSS, and the annual event has been a big part of our professional (and a small part of our personal) lives for quite some time. It seems like the end of an era – something akin to your favorite dive bar closing because the new owner of the block wants to build lab space.

I’d argue that the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society can easily let go of the trade show and still support its members. In fact, without the burden of planning a huge event, it may arguably serve its members better, with more local in-person events through its dozens of chapters and more virtual events that can help members earn continuing education credits and come with a fraction of the operating expense. (Both could also increase accessibility for anyone unable to travel great distances for any number of reasons.)

Of course, there’s also HLTH (and, more recently, ViVE). The event has been largely successful, in part because it has focused on bringing people together in a festive atmosphere. That may seem trite, but particularly after the pandemic, there’s value in being able to convince people to convene in person. HLTH’s hosted buyer model is also the envy of many an event planner – it gets the provider and payer audience in for free while guaranteeing vendors the meetings with the decision-makers they crave.

Like any established entity facing an upstart – and especially one with some VC money behind it – HIMSS has felt pressure to compete. But it’s not without blame. The event was cancelled in 2020 – with little notice and with no immediate refunds available. (If you’ve ever worked for an event company, you know why this decision was made.) Partial credits were subsequently offered, but the decision left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.

Like I said, I primarily remember HIMSS fondly. I first attended in 2010, when TechTarget was launching its healthcare vertical site. I went most years between then and 2019. In 2015, I moderated a roundtable discussion, having had accepted a speaking submission proposal that I based off an article I wrote for CIO.com. In 2018 and 2019, I was a social media ambassador, having been picked mostly because I spent a lot of time on Twitter questioning whether the industry was truly engaging patients as it claimed to.

By 2019, though, the cracks were showing. That was the year attendance peaked at 43,000. (It was back up to 35,000 this spring, which was a pleasant surprise to me.) The expo hall floor was a maze, heavily favoring vendors with big pockets There wasn’t enough coffee or food, and little of the latter is healthy. The hotel shuttles – necessary, as HIMSS is so large it can only take place in sprawling cities – were perpetually late, and the ride share surcharges were more hilarious than painful only because I wasn’t paying for them myself. The agenda was crammed, which on the face of it isn’t bad but means it’s impossible to take in all the sessions you want to see.

Since then, my appetite for business travel has diminished substantially. By the summer of 2021, when the first post-pandemic event happened, I was a new father. I’ve yet to feel the tug of HIMSS, HLTH, ViVE, or any other large-scale event since then. (Full disclosure: Digital Health Insights, one of my clients, is run by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, which is a partner in ViVE.) It probably helps that I was able to use the previous events to build and cultivate a network that has lasted more than a decade and gotten me a fair share of my work.

That may be why I’m meeting the end of HIMSS as we know with a bit of a shrug. It’s still going to live on as the industry’s leading trade show. In fact, without direct attachment to the HIMSS organization, it may finally become the trade show it’s been trying to be for years, with more emphasis on vendors and less on speakers who have gone through a fairly cumbersome application process to get on the agenda and present in the seventh conference room on the right past the giant pillar with the wraparound banner for the company advertising its new AI assistant. Whether decision makers from provider organizations see value in attending remains to be seen, but the event will still make money.

As I said, HIMSS the organization may benefit from addition by subtraction, too. Smaller events may help people build local connections, and virtual events may let HIMSS remain a partner for professional development. The providers that can be hard to find at a trade show may play a more prominent role as well, whether directly as event hosts or sponsors or indirectly in their ability to send more people to an event now that hotel and airfare (plus ancillary costs like childcare or elder care, transportation, meals, and so on) are out of the picture.

Maybe the metaphor isn’t a dive bar closing so a lab can go up. (For my Greater Bostonians, that would be Sligo Pub. Did I go there? Yes. Do I miss it? No.) Maybe it’s a crappy bar getting sold, renovated with newfangled things like credit card machines and windows that open, and updated with local beer and decent food. (In this case, that’s Elm Street Taproom replacing the Joshua Tree, which I don’t think anyone misses.)

Time will tell, of course, but at the moment I’m not sure that I see much changing as the HIMSS trade show changes hands.