I just got back yesterday from the HIMSS Annual Conference in Orlando. With ~1300 vendors and ~28,000 attendees it was the biggest show yet. For someone who works in the industry, it was an amazing event with a lot of people really motivated and dedicated to using IT to improve our healthcare system. There’s something beautiful about working in an industry where if you do your job well, you could save a life.
While we all understand this core goal, it was really interesting to see all the noise that was coming from all 1300 healthcare IT vendors that were trying to market their product at the event.
From a Health IT Marketing and PR perspective, my co-organizer Shahid Shah shared one of the key insights that every health IT marketing & PR professional should consider in their efforts. During the Social Media and Influencer Meetup which Shahid, Cari McLean and myself hosted, Shahid bluntly commented that “No one cares about your product, but your mom.” He repeated it about 3 times to emphasize the point with the final time saying, “No, Serioulsy! No one cares about your product, but your mom.”
Shahid’s point is an important one. No one buys a healthcare IT product because of some feature or function. People buy something because it helps them solve a problem. No one wants to buy an EMR because it does CPOE or has voice recognition. They buy the EMR because it makes them more efficient, gets them access to stimulus money, avoids penalties, etc.
Of course, this is a really small preview of what we’re planning to cover at the Health IT Marketing and PR Conference. We talked to hundreds of companies last week at HIMSS and they were all really excited and interested in what we’re doing with this event. Many of them told me, “This is needed!”
Less than a month and a half until the event. Our group rate at the conference hotel ends next week, so register for the conference today. We look forward to seeing many of you in April in Las Vegas.
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