From the March 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


HCB News: Which conferences are your most popular and why?
DM: Our fastest growing market is information technology combined with our Radiology & Imaging Conference. No single department in the hospital can function without technology and these departments in the hospital have a tremendous responsibility both in terms of day-to-day technological support as well as keeping a vision for the future of the organization’s technology infrastructure.

We have recently combined these two conferences into a concurrent conference format. The two groups share common activities like keynote speaking, meals and networking events. The educational sessions are separated so that it can be specific to each market, and we also separated the Reverse Expo sessions so that the suppliers attending could attend all eight hours of the Reverse Expo for both conferences if they sell into both of these markets, by buying a dual conference registration. We put these two conferences together because we noticed that many of the same suppliers were attending both of our conferences separately.
As each of these conferences started to grow, some of the companies had to decide which one would be most important to them. In the past, we would host these two conferences in the same week. The first would run from Monday through mid-day on Wednesday and then the next one would start on Wednesday and end on Friday. The suppliers that support the conferences said they just could not be out of the office for a full week, even though they really wanted to attend both conferences. So, we came up with a clever way of organizing the schedules such that we were able to overlay both conferences over the same dates. We have found this to provide increased benefit to all attendees and the model has been very successful.

HCB News: Is there any plan to expand beyond conferences?
DM: This year, we plan to expand our educational experience beyond the live conference setting by hosting educational webinars. Again, the focus of our company is on hospital executive education. Our plans are to take that same focus and continue to industry-leading educational opportunities specific to the hospital department leaders in the markets we serve. It is our hope that the educational experience can be extended to reach more hospital executives that may not have had the opportunity to attend one of our live events.

HCB News: What do you think are the challenges facing HCP?
DM: Hospital executives are extremely busy. They are being asked each day to cut budgets, do more with less and reduce staff. One of the challenges we face is making sure we continue to bring value to the hospital executive so that they will always make time in their very busy schedules to be out of the office for three days to attend our events. We will never lose track of the fact that the hospital attendee is the most important aspect of our conferences. While cutting-edge education is very important to the hospital executives — and we will continue to keep that a priority for our conferences — we also know that hospitals still need to find quality suppliers.

March 2016 Magazine

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