HIMSS Describes Itself as a "Trade Association" in a Press Release

Mr. HIStalk comes up with an interesting tidbit about HIMSS in the following post:

HIMSS "applauds" ...Tom Daschle’s appointment as HHS secretary, apparently joining every other industry in hoping for some Uncle Sam handouts. HIMSS says it’s looking forward to "working closely" with Daschle, Obama, and every citizen of Washington, DC and its suburbs to make sure the feds help pay for technology that supposedly already pays for itself. HIMSS calls itself both a membership society and a vendor trade association in its press release, which is the first time I recall hearing anyone there publicly admit the latter. Does that mean we all belong to a vendor trade association?

Here's the exact language from the HIMSS press release to which Mr. HIStalk refers:

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), a membership society of more than 20,000 healthcare IT and management systems professionals, and trade association with over 350 corporations, applauds the nomination of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

I have posted a number of previous notes about HIMSS (examples: HIMSS President Slams PHRs: I Wonder Why?, Dropping Out of HIMSS: A CEO Speaks His Mind, A Curious Aspect of the HIMSS Registration Process).

I  totally agree with Mr. HIStalk. It's impossible, in my opinion, for an organization such as HIMSS to represent itself simultaneously as both a membership society and a trade association. This constitutes a conflict of interest. In the former capacity, the organization is committed to represent the purchasers of IT products, hospital-based IT personnel. In the latter capacity, it represents the vendors of these same products. There is no possible way for HIMSS to represent both constituencies adequately and honestly.

Let's run a thought experiment about which constituency HIMSS might favor over the course of time. The typical HIMSS annual meeting attracts hundreds of vendors in the exhibitor area many of which pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to display their goods. Booth fees that go directly to HIMSS comprise a portion of this total cost to the vendors. Here's an interactive map of the vendor area floor plan for the 2009 conference at McCormick Place in Chicago. Individual membership dues are $140. You do the math.

What's fascinating to me is that this HIMSS conflict-of-interest doesn't seem to bother the membership or, alternatively, they have learned to live with it. The membership fee is obviously kept quite low and everyone understands the rules of the game. Hospital IT professionals have a need to attend the annual HIMSS conference. As members, they get a special discount against the conference registration fee. HIMSS can also boast of having 20,000 members, all of whom understand that the organization is largely working for the 350 companies that it represents as a trade organization.

:: Update on 12/09/2008 @ 9:45 a.m.

Mr. HIStalk apropos of the above note makes the following observation:

Curious: above are the original (from Google’s cache) and current (from the HIMSS site) versions of the HIMSS press release referring to the organization (for the first time ever, as far as I can tell) as a trade association. That troublesome phrase has been quietly expunged. I guess we still don’t know if it is or not.

I wonder if the IRS is tracking all of this to-and-fro. Trade associations are taxed differently than non-profit membership organizations.