I received an email notice recently about the upcoming GE Healthcare User Summit that will take place on August 27 - 30, 2007, in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference is advertised as integrating the following specialty areas: Centricity business, EMR, enterprise, imaging, laboratory, perinatal, perioperative, practice management as well as diagnostic cardiology, and telemetry . The conference home page describes the Summit in the following way:
The Summit brings users from around the world to share their ideas, network, and discover best practices through real-life case studies. This year's conference brings together the collective knowledge of users from across the [various] GE Healthcare solutions...
My first inclination was to view this conference as a Centricity user group meeting. However, I read further and discovered the the fee structure for the conference was the following:
Early Customer Registration Fee: $595
Late and On Site Customer Registration Fee $895
Customer Contracted Consultant Fee: $2,100.00
These struck me has relatively a high fee structure for a user group and that some registrants might balk at paying them if the event was a pure marketing exercise. Cerner, of course, presents its own gala annually, the Cerner Health Conference, and is participating in 89 trade shows during 2007. Cerner also charges relatively high registration fees for its annual conference but, I am sure, would recoil from the idea that this event is a user group activity. I suspect that both GE and Cerner would suggest that the educational and networking value of these conferences more than justifies their cost.
So what is going on here? I will focus on GE Healthcare rather than Cerner because it now markets a broad array of hardware, software, and IVD products spanning the entire healthcare diagnostic horizon. From both an educational and marketing perspective, their conference is highly integrative and transcends specialty boundaries. Moreover and from an educational perspective, it has a powerful claim on the mind share of its customers. One of the most powerful drivers for registrants at professional conferences such as this one is to improve one's efficiency and effectiveness in the workplace. For those healthcare professionals using a wide array of GE Centricity products, such a large conference would surely have a significant claim on their highly valued time.
Note the disconnect between the title of the conference, GE Healthcare User Summit, and the fact that most of the topics areas covered as Centricity software products. Also covered, however, are diagnostic cardiology and telemetry. I suspect that it is the intention of the company to ultimately transform this conference into a much broader cross-disciplinary and cross-product diagnostic event. This may present, in time, a formidable challenge to major specialty-bounded conferences such as the AACC's annual meeting which is cross-vendor but not cross-disciplinary. The AACC conference attracts about 20,000 participants and 700 exhibitors from more than 100 countries.
I remember some years ago, the chair of our hospital's Performance Improvement Council began a campaign to convince the CEO to implement the 6 sigma program. He invited a representative from GE to give a presentation on six sigma principles and application to our medical executive committee and hospital executives. The presentation turned out to be a blatant commercial for GE's healthcare consultancy services, embarrassing the PIC chair and definitively killing any momentum toward the six sigma program.
My attitude toward GE and all these businesses has become quite a bit more cynical since.
Posted by: bev | March 22, 2007 at 08:09 PM