Health IT

Try our Health IT Meeting Name Generator

How hard can it be to name a health IT/digital health/connected health event? Try it yourself.

Of all the things we write about, news of a new conference seems among the least controversial. But our report Thursday that the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society was combining its mHealth Summit with new events called the Cyber Security Summit and Population Health Summit under an umbrella named the Connected Health Conference drew backlash right off the bat.

Some think that HIMSS simply has gotten too big.

Others dislike the “mHealth” appellation, and don’t seem to be fans of HIMSS itself.

It should be noted that Matthew Holt is co-chair of the Health 2.0 organization and conferences, and thus presumably doesn’t want to lose business to this Connected Health Conference. We also wish he had linked to our article, but the publication he did link to is owned by HIMSS.

Whether the mHealth Summit is “flailing” is open to debate. Attendance at the 2014 event was 3,500, down from nearly 5,000 the year before.

It seems as if a lot of people dislike the location, in National Harbor, Md., which is convenient to Reagan National Airport, Old Town Alexandria, Va. — especially if you have a boat — and pretty much nothing else in the Washington area. Many disliked the schedule, historically the second week of December, but that changes this year, when the event moves to early November, in no small part because the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center would rather host Christmas revelers than a health IT crowd.

I can’t say for sure that HIMSS “steals” names with its new Cyber Security Summit and Population Health Summit, or even the overarching Connected Health Conference, but it got the editorial team at MedCity News thinking: The names might be straightforward, but they aren’t terribly original.

I mean, how hard can it be to name a health IT/digital health/connected health event? Try it yourself and tweet the result with hashtag #HITconferencenames. I’ll start: Disruptive Health Forum.

Photo: Flickr user Jack Dorsey 

 

 

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