Practical Health IT Innovation Conference

For those regular readers, you’ve probably been seeing some of the promotion we’ve been doing for a new healthcare IT conference called Health IT Expo. Yes, this is our first time hosting a healthcare IT Conference of our own, but we are in our 5th year organizing the Healthcare IT Marketing and PR Conference. While we attend and enjoy attending ~30 healthcare IT conferences per year, we think there’s something missing in these conferences that we can address at Health IT Expo.

Hundreds of people over the years have suggested that we should host our own healthcare IT conference. I’d always resisted doing so because I didn’t want to just create another me too conference. In many ways, it felt like there were enough conferences. However, having attended hundreds of conference over the years, I realized that something really big was missing at these conferences: practical innovation.

Most healthcare IT conferences are short on practical innovation and long on useless platitudes.

Last month I wrote that Health IT Expo was the Anti Moonshot Conference. Not that there’s anything wrong with people working on moonshot ideas. That’s a lot of fun and really exciting. However, if you’re a healthcare IT professional that’s overwhelmed by operational minutiea, listening to moonshot ideas ends up leaving you empty and longing for practical innovations that can improve your work life.

Long story short, we’ll be focusing the conference on the following 5 areas of healthcare IT innovation to start:

  • Security and Privacy
  • Analytics
  • Communication and Patient Engagement
  • IT Dev Ops
  • Operational Alignment and Support

We want to take everything we’ve learned attending conferences and organizing one for 5 years and make Health IT Expo a one of a kind experience for those working in these 5 areas.

As part of this conference, we also want to extend the innovation that’s shared over the 2 day event well beyond the conference. One of the other major challenges in healthcare IT is that innovations aren’t shared between organizations. Unlike healthcare data, we don’t mind sharing innovations in healthcare IT. However, there hasn’t been a great platform for this sharing.

For example, how does an IT professional at a hospital share a unique way they implemented 1000 new virtual desktops and saved their organization time and money? The sad answer is they don’t. How does a healthcare IT professional learn about a new company that can solve their physician communication problems? In many cases they don’t.

One of our goals is to use Healthcare Scene and this new conference to create a platform for innovation sharing. As a simple example, we’re finalizing resource pages around each of the 5 topics listed above. These pages will list companies that are innovating in each spaceso they’re easy to find. I’ve been blogging for 12 years and published over 12,000 blog posts and even I was surprised by some of the companies we found. We’ll do a future post linking to those pages once they’re published.

At the end of the day, we have one major goal. How can we make healthcare IT professionals lives better so we improve healthcare?

If that goal interests you, take a minute to check out Health IT Expo. If you’re a healthcare IT professional that wants to be part of this community, reach out to us on our contact us page. Share your experience with us and we’ll give you a special discount code to attend the conference where it doesn’t break your budget.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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