CHIME and HLTH Announce New Digital Health Industry Conference Called ViVE

If you’ve been following us on Twitter, you’ve probably seen that Colin Hung and myself have been live tweeting the CHIME 2021 Spring Forum event happening this week.  It’s been a well organized event with a number of great insights from healthcare CIOs and a number of vendor speakers including most of the top EHRs.  We’ll be sharing many of those insights in some future articles.

However, today CHIME together with HLTH announced some really exciting news about a new spring event that’s launching in March 2022 called ViVE which will be held in Miami Beach.  The inaugural ViVE event will be held March 6-9, 2022 and brings together the best of CHIME’s CIO Spring Forum with HLTH’s hosted buyer program and of course a mix of programming and specialty events with top healthcare leaders discussing digital health innovation.  Here’s the full list of what ViVE will feature:

• Programming and specialty events with top thought leaders shaping tech-enabled healthcare and addressing key issues in digital health innovation
• CHIME’s signature Spring Forum providing high-quality education and networking opportunities for CHIME members and CHIME Foundation firm members
• The ViVE Expo that will recognize the unique needs of sponsors, exhibitors and partners and deliver customized experiences in a creative setting
• 1-to-1 curated matchmaking, through the ViVE Hosted Buyer program that pairs digital health vendors with interested buyers
• Mission-driven events and giving back initiatives including the HLTH Foundation’s Techquity Impact Program, focused on realizing health equity through technology; and a gala to support the Foundation’s initiatives promoting equity, inclusion and opportunity in healthcare

As someone who attends and follows all of the various healthcare IT conferences, this is a really interesting pairing.  The first HLTH event was an amazing production and did a great job bringing together investors, healthcare innovation companies, and innovation officers, but there weren’t that many CIOs or provider organizations at the event.  CHIME always did a great job bringing together CIO and other health IT leaders at provider organizations.  Combining the two is going to make for a really interesting and powerful mix.

Worth noting is that the CHIME Spring Forum used to be held the day before the annual HIMSS conference.  It’s not clear why CHIME and HIMSS chose to separate, but 2020 caused a lot of things to change and CHIME and HIMSS chose to go different paths.  In 2021, HIMSS was smart to move their usual spring event to August 2021 in Las Vegas and they’ll be holding their own CIO Summit the day before the main conference.  CHIME in 2021 decided to do a virtual spring event, a summer event with satellite sites, and a hybrid CHIME Fall Forum in San Diego.

Now CHIME has a new home for their Spring Forum combined with HLTH at the new ViVE event.  CHIME told me that they’ll continue with their standalone Fall Forum event like usual and I assume HLTH will continue their Fall event as well.

It’s definitely an exciting time in healthcare innovation with COVID pushing forward a number of opportunities to innovate.  Plus, it’s amazing to see all the health IT funding that’s flowing into digital health solutions.  It will be interesting to see how ViVE combines the more consumer focused side of digital health together with the more enterprise health IT solutions that most CIOs purchase.  Plus, given ViVE’s close proximity to HIMSS 2022 which is scheduled the week after, we’ll see if CIOs and health IT leaders choose to attend both or if they have to choose one or the other.

Of course, this is all looking forward to 2022 while many of us are still making our plans for 2021 conferences happening this summer and fall.  If you’re interested in how health IT companies are looking at conferences in 2021, our healthcare marketing community is doing a health IT conference survey.  We’ll be sharing a summary of the survey results with everyone who completes the survey.

What do you think of this combined event?  Do you think this is a good match or is their a disconnect between what HLTH offers and what CHIME members want?  Let us know your thoughts in the comments and on Twitter with @hcittoday.