Our Latest & Greatest:

The HIMSS16 dust is clearing, and the steady stream of buzz and announcements last week suggests that the healthcare landscape ahead will be bright.

With HiMSS only two short weeks away, it’s time to stop the runaway train for a moment, pause and assess your communications strategy for maximizing the conference and achieving the results you—and your management team—are hoping for.

In a sea of 40,000+ HIT professionals, clinicians and executives and close to 1,400 vendors from around the world and with a plethora of renowned speakers and keynotes, cutting-edge products and educational opportunities all vying for attendees’ time and attention, it is very easy to get lost in the shuffle. To help today’s marketers and PR professionals make the most of their time and investments, we’ve put together a few tried and true strategies to help you realize that return on investment you are hoping for.

Content that Counts

Put in place a well-rounded content strategy that starts to target your key audiences and stakeholders well in advance of the show—and that not just pushes information to people but drives engagement and action. As we all know, content comes in many forms. Determine the best formats for your company’s audiences (premium content pieces such as studies, surveys and whitepapers, or other content such as social media, news releases, blog posts, HTML email newsletters, to name a few), spend time carefully crafting the message you want people to take away and the imagery around it to make it “pop” and gain eyeballs, and outline a timeline for distribution to ensure a steady stream leading up to, during and, even, after the show (without making it seem like you are “the boy that cried wolf”). Also, if you are a user of HubSpot, Marketo or any other inbound marketing platform, be sure to integrate your content efforts for added impact.

As 2016 kicks off there are no signs of a slowdown in the rapid pace of big disruptions, transformations and innovations in the overall healthcare space. To take a deep dive into key topics across the entire industry would take far more space than this blog provides. Therefore, with HiMSS just around the corner (February 29 – March 4), we’ll turn our attention to some of the key healthcare IT trends we are expecting to be hot and that we’re seeing through our work with clients.

At a macro level, we anticipate the concepts of Data & Analytics, Security, Digital Health and Consumerism to drive much of the conversation at the conference as well as throughout the year against the backdrop of the Presidential Election, the Affordable Care Act (in what is anticipated to be the costliest year for compliance), and uncertainty in the U.S. financial market which only adds to the existing pressure of continually rising healthcare costs and the impact on all constituents involved from consumers to providers to payers.

Data & Analytics

Healthcare organizations have a ton of data—and the amount is increasing by the second, literally! As the adoption of EHR systems and strategies matures, so will the need to harness data for decision support both at micro and macro levels. The aggregation of patient data across multiple health information technology resources, the analysis of that data into a single, actionable patient record, and the actions through which care providers can improve both clinical and financial outcomes will continue to be one critical area we see develop.

Image from startupstockphotos.com used under CC license.

Greetings from the front lines of HIMSS! As you may have seen from our internal HIMSS Communications Command Center, the PR team in Boston and on the ground in Chicago is busy staying abreast of all the news coming from the show. Here are some highlights:

In a HIMSS keynote session yesterday morning, Bruce D. Broussard, president and chief executive officer at Humana, called on information sharing and interoperability to help transform the U.S. healthcare system.

Broussard shared some of the biggest losses from the country’s fragmented system, including $1 trillion in wasted healthcare spending each year. A companion LinkedIn post detailed examples, including $210 billion spent on unnecessary services such as repeated tests and $156 billion spent in 2007 on administrative costs such as claims processing and prior authorization. Additionally, he mentioned that the average physician practice spends $68,274 per physician per year interacting with health plans.

Image by https://www.flickr.com/photos/audiolucistore/ used under CC license.

With HIMSS right around the corner, we are thrilled that Health Data Management’s News Editor Joe Goedert took time out of his busy schedule to speak with the PAN PR team about what is undoubtedly is the biggest healthcare IT conference of the year.

PAN: Joe, what issues do you think will be at the front and center of this year’s show?

JG: I believe population health management issues will be prevalent at this year’s show, as they are tied to the emerging federal and commercial insurance policies to emphasize accountable care and value-based reimbursement.