HIMSS has acquired the conference component of Health 2.0, effective immediately. HIMSS will establish a new Health 2.0 business unit within the enterprise that includes HIMSS North America, HIMSS Analytics, HIMSS Media, HIMSS Europe, HIMSS AsiaPacific, and the Personal Connected Health Alliance.
“Bringing Health 2.0 into the HIMSS enterprise is a major expansion of our available resources to achieve better health through technology,” says H. Stephen Lieber, CAE, HIMSS president and CEO. “This approach will align the knowledge and expertise from the Health 2.0 global network of entrepreneurs, developers, and end users engaged in the most leading-edge technologies with that of clinicians, IT professionals, executives, policy leaders, and other health IT stakeholders to empower and enable people to live healthier lives.”
Lieber noted that HIMSS has no plans of changing the type or scope of the conferences presented in the past by Health 2.0. Instead, this expansion provides an opportunity for HIMSS to expand its own educational offerings with a stronger focus on start-up technologies in digital health.
Health 2.0 held its first conference in 2007 and now holds three regular conferences in the US, with others in Europe and Asia. Over the past decade, Health 2.0 has welcomed more than 25,000 conference attendees worldwide, hosted over 4,000 demos, and introduced hundreds of new companies to the health technology industry.
“The creation of a Health 2.0 business unit within HIMSS represents a natural evolution, as digital health technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by established healthcare organizations,” says Indu Subaiya, CEO and co-chairman of Health 2.0. “We believe that the union of our businesses and ecosystems will offer unparalleled access and provide new mechanisms for early-stage innovation to permeate and transform the entire healthcare industry in the US and globally.”
In next nine months, seven Health 2.0 conferences will be held from May through December 2017, as well as a January 2018 conference.
