HIMSS brings its Global Health Conference and Exhibition to McCormick Place in Chicago for four days in April, opening with a preconference day on the fifth and closing on the eighth. The year is 2027. The conference and exhibition proper run across the final three of those days.
The society, formally the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, describes the week as four days of education, innovation and collaboration, and the scale is substantial: more than 600 education sessions, nine preconference forums, an executive summit and an exhibition floor that mixes established health technology vendors with startups. The previous edition drew more than 24,000 attendees.
Why it matters this cycle
Health systems in the United States are running two difficult programmes at once. They are still absorbing the cost of electronic record platforms bought over the past decade, and they are being asked to layer artificial intelligence, interoperability and cybersecurity obligations on top of them while operating margins remain thin. Few sectors have a wider gap between what the technology promises and what the finance office will approve.
That gap is what the conference is really about. The programme is organised by role rather than by product, with separate tracks for nurses, physicians, payers, investors and government officials, which reflects how fragmented the buying decision has become inside a large provider. A clinical information officer, a chief financial officer and a state regulator can all be in the building with legitimately different questions about the same system.
For an executive audience the relevant signal is procurement behaviour. Specialty pavilions on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and government are where the sector's near term spending priorities are visible, and the volume of serious buyer traffic through them is a better guide to the year ahead than any vendor forecast. The event is also one of the larger recruiting grounds in health technology leadership, and senior moves in the sector frequently originate in the week.
Registration, the education catalogue and the exhibitor directory are published by the organiser and are updated through the year ahead of the conference.
