The 2006 HIMSS convention took place in San Diego, and I was able to spend two days seeing everything.  The HIMSS show at this point is too large to be taken in by one person in the 5 days it covers.  The exhibit hall alone had more than 800 vendors, placing it in the category of the Smithsonian Institution - you can never see everything there is to see.

 

Along with filling the entire San Diego convention center on two levels with exhibits, the overlapping sessions require a team approach to cover everything.

 

While the show is large (physically) on a cosmic proportion, it is the place for vendors to talk to each other.  It is the most vendor-friendly conference you could attend, and there is a lot of business-to-business discussions going on.  You can also spot the trends from year to year.  “HIPAA Compliant” has now been scratched off all the exhibits and “EMR Compatible” written on top.

 

Surprises?  CIOs seem to be a vanishing breed in the exhibit hall.  They are probably afraid to walk in since they’d be pounced on by all those vendors.  Very little hardware and other “commodity” technology on display from the well-known names.  Vendors like Microsoft and Oracle seem to just use their space to set up kiosks for smaller partners to use and don’t do near the training and demonstrations of core technology they used to.  As less development happens by end user healthcare organizations its probably not worth their time for this (obvious exception - anything integration related).

 

San Diego is a great place to go for a conference.  Especially from Maryland in February!