Hal Wolf, who joined the Chicago-based HIMSS organization (Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society) in September 2017, has overseen a period of strong growth and expansion for the healthcare IT professional membership organization. He spoke with Healthcare Innovation Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland recently, as he and his colleagues gear up for HIMSS25, which will take place March 3-6 in Las Vegas. Below are excerpts from their conversation.
Let’s begin with HIMSS25. What is your estimate on what attendance will be this year?
We have a contest every year on the boards, to correctly predict the attendance. We’re tracking ahead of last year, so it’s running around 30,000 at this point, as it was last year. We’re further ahead on member attendance and paid attendance than over the past multiple years, so we’re very excited about that. The attendance includes the professionals, as well as the other group, the market suppliers. We’ve always had a very high attendee to market supplier ratio, usually 2X, which is higher than any other major show. And the global conference is the largest membership meeting of our members globally.
How many countries do you have members in?
Well over 70. You’ll see over 70 countries represented, and we have communities globally. Two out of five are outside North America; seven years ago, that would have been one out of 14. Our membership continues to grow gradually in North America, but it’s really growing overseas, by leaps and bounds. The growth in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. And we’ve always had a presence in South America, but now we’re really going to be expanding our presence there.
What will be different this year?
There are a lot of new things going on. The Interoperability Showcase won’t be there, but we’ll have the Interconnectivity Pavilion. It’s really the AI Pavilion; and you’ll see AI all over the floor. And we’ve gone from, what is it, what are the cautions, to now, it’s everywhere. The Emerge Innovation Experience, Albe will send you the details. But it’s fundamentally the new brands that have been selected by panels, and what we think will be breakthrough applications. We’ve also created a new Health Equity Conference Forum. And the biggest change we’ve ever had; one of the biggest requests we’ve had from market suppliers and exhibitors, they want to go to a lot of the education sessions and be involved in networking. So we’ll have some midday breaks so everyone can go to those educational sessions.
We’ll have over 300 educational sessions; 150-plus qualify for CE credits. A lot of people when they make their case to their boss about attending, it’s not just networking and catching up on technology, but it’s also catching up on education. A lot of people have requirements in their personal performance goals, to keep their education up to date.
And that’s a place where we’ve been putting a lot of time and money into that. And we have an expanded hosted-buyers’ program. It was a huge success, and it’s doubled in size for this year and has already sold out. And not surprisingly, you’ll hear a lot of focus on AI, cybersecurity, digital health transformation, and workforce development. Those are four consistent themes that you’ll see. We’ll get you a full list of the sessions. Cyberthreat intelligence, protecting patient safety, how do you create models for care optimization, care analytics. And we introduced our analytics maturity model, which puts a focus on taking your analytics to the next level for value-based care. It was introduced in South Korea last year at the end of 2024. And that’s really cool for us.
And there will be two new forums: smart health transformation forum; and a health equity pre-conference forum. This is one: there are some unique and interesting challenges around the idea of health equity. HIMSS is very firm about its view of health equity, and why that is so important to us.
I’m attending ViVE. I find that they’re different conferences. Does ViVE impact your programming at all?
Does what they do impact our programming? Not at all. And they can speak for themselves in terms of what they do and don’t do. We’ve been focusing on meeting the needs of our members on a global basis. Our attendance continues to go up, and that’s great. And we’ve initiated some significant programs that we call HIMSS Connect that are training programs for CIOs and CMIOs. And just last week, we announced our exclusive relationship with AMDIS (the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems). We’ve always had a good relationship with AMDIS; now we’re joined at the hip. We’ll be focusing on the CMIOs at an unprecedented educational level, as well as bringing them together. In the past, AMDIS has done excellent education and training; we’re going to be expanding that role to Europe, Asia, South America; the demand for CMIOs to lead at an organizational level is tremendous. We have more CMIOs signing up than ever before. It will be interesting for ViVE: what happened to them since HLTH got sold. We know that CHIME has had a relationship with them; but last year, we had 400 new CIOs at HIMSS, and expect for 400 new ones again this year. Informa has pumped a lot of resources into HIMSS. And I wish them well; it’s not an either-or; HLTH continues to move back towards its investor-based ecosystem.
