What health tech marketers really think about ViVE, HIMSS, and where face-to-face is heading
Every year around this time, health tech marketing teams surface from the Q1 conference insanity (ViVE, HIMSS, and whatever else filled the calendar) and try to assess the value.
This year, I convened two sessions with The Healthtech Marketing Network, senior health tech marketers, right after both shows, alongside a survey of nearly 20 executive marketing leaders. What I heard was more interesting than the usual post-event debrief.
Participation and Spending
Not surprisingly, HIMSS and ViVE dominated, but as we will discuss later, many firms had a more diversified approach that allowed them to skip the mega-events
Regardless of company size, Q1 events represent a major investment.
What struck me in the conversations was that face-to-face matters more than ever and the variety of approaches firms are taking. This also revealed a consistent sentiment toward HIMSS and polarized opinions toward ViVE.
HIMSS Has Recovered. ViVE Has Work to Do.
Let’s start with the data, directional as it is. Nearly half of the respondents who attended both HIMSS and ViVE said HIMSS outperformed. HIMSS rated materially higher on perceived value. Not a single respondent rated HIMSS below expectations.
ViVE, by contrast, drew a notably mixed reaction — nearly a third rated it below expectations.
The conversation filled in the why.
On HIMSS
The COVID hangover has fully cleared. The show feels like it used to. Attendance was strong, deal conversations were substantive, and the general mood coming out was cautiously optimistic. Teams that went in with clear objectives and pre-booked meetings came away with a pipeline. Teams that went in hoping something would happen mostly didn’t.
On ViVE
The LA location was genuinely damaging. The convention center location, the surrounding neighborhood, and the general logistics all drew consistent complaints. But the more structural issue runs deeper than geography. ViVE’s value proposition has always rested on its connection to the CHIME community — CIOs and senior health system IT leaders. In practice, those leaders tend to self-sequester at a separate hotel, doing focus groups and peer meetings among themselves, and don’t make it over to the main floor in meaningful numbers. Vendors show up hoping to meet hospital CIOs and end up meeting other vendors. That’s a hard problem to solve, and ViVE hasn’t cracked it yet.
The nuance worth adding: ViVE’s ROI is highly context-dependent. If you’re selling AI right now, it’s a different conversation. One CMO I spoke with had fifteen one-on-one meetings at ViVE, one no-show, and twelve follow-up demo requests within 48 hours of the show closing. Being in the right category at the right moment matters. For everyone else, the verdict is genuinely out.
ViVE has committed to Nashville going forward, dropping the two-year LA contract after sustained pressure from exhibitors. If they get the next show right, the narrative could shift quickly. But there are enough disgruntled teams that the goodwill buffer is thin.
Why ROI Measurement Is Misleading
While the majority of marketers polled said they were confident in a positive ROI, for many health tech companies, the way they are forced to measure it actively distorts their decision-making.
This is especially the case given the variety of positive impacts that events have. As this chart depicts, events are about so much more than leads.
The standard approach is to count the leads, attribute the pipeline to the event, and calculate cost per opportunity. This assumes a clean causal chain that doesn’t exist in B2B health tech. Sales cycles run one to three years. Buying committees have fifteen to twenty people. A prospect might interact with your company at HIMSS in year one, download three pieces of content over the next two years, attend a webinar, meet your CEO at a regional event, and then request a demo in year three. Which event gets the credit? None of them, and all of them.
One marketing leader at a large health IT vendor described pulling a contact record for their leadership team: a prospect who had touched nine different marketing assets and events over five years before raising their hand to buy. The single-event ROI for any one of those touchpoints was zero. The cumulative effect was a closed deal.
This doesn’t mean ROI measurement is useless. One CMO at a midsize company reported a 5x return on her full-event investment. This was achievable because deal sizes are large, the team tracks meticulously, and she’s disciplined about not overspending on presence. The math works when it’s honest. But it requires knowing your actual cost basis, your realistic conversion rates, and your attribution model going in, not retrospectively justifying spend after the fact.
The more useful mental model I heard across these conversations: treat your event calendar as a portfolio, not a collection of individual bets. The question isn’t “did HIMSS pay off?” It’s “did we achieve roughly the right presence, at the right mix of events, at the right investment level across the year?” That reframe can change how you allocate budget, how you evaluate individual shows, and how you talk to your CEO about it.
What Experiential Actually Means
“Experiential marketing” has become one of those phrases that means everything and nothing. So let me be concrete about what it looked like in practice, based on the teams I spoke with, and what separated the executions that worked from those that didn’t.
The best examples shared three things: they were authentic to the brand, they had a mechanism to capture who engaged, and they were designed with the follow-up journey in mind.
One team built a fake conference aisle through the middle of their HIMSS booth. This was matched to the hall carpet, flanked by a relaxation area with couches and water stations. Attendees wandered through, thinking they were still in the main walkway, sat down to rest their feet, and ended up in conversations. Traffic was constant throughout the show. The insight is almost embarrassingly simple: tired trade show attendees will always choose somewhere to sit down. Give them that, and you’re already ahead.
Another team deployed a camera crew and a live interview setup inside their booth. This created a media-like energy that drew attention from passersby and, crucially, generated content for six weeks of post-event distribution. Every conversation in the booth became a potential asset. The booth investment paid for itself twice.
At the more resource-intensive end, one large health IT vendor structured its entire HIMSS week around a marquee Monday-night event that brought hundreds of its global community together before the show floor opened. This created a social gravity that made their booth the natural gathering point for that community all week. The event investment worked because it was structured around a journey, not just written as a budget line.
The failure mode I heard most often: experiential that’s fun but disconnected from the brand, and experiential that generates buzz without capturing who showed up. Branded car rides are excellent awareness plays — unless you have no way of knowing who got in the car.
Smaller, More Intentional Events
The most strategically significant trend across these conversations wasn’t about HIMSS or ViVE. It was about everything else.
A meaningful number of senior marketers are actively rebalancing their event budgets. They are moving dollars away from the big shows and toward specialty events, regional events, hosted dinners, and owned experiences. The reasons are consistent: better audience fit, more genuine conversation, and the ability for smaller companies to achieve something like brand saturation in a focused context rather than disappearing into the noise at a 40,000-person trade show.
The tactics that kept coming up:
- Speaking slots before booth. At smaller events, anchoring the investment in a speaking slot and pairing it with a hosted reception outperforms a booth on almost every dimension including cost, engagement quality, and content output. You’re seen as a contributor, not just a vendor. You spend less. You generate more.
- Geo-targeting around deal champions. One senior marketer described mapping where their active deal contacts are physically located. This was not just company headquarters, but where the actual people on the buying committee live. They used that data to plan satellite dinners and roundtables in those cities. The result is owned events with built-in relevance, lower cost than trade show sponsorship, and no competing for attention with fifty other vendors.
- The site visit. Inviting prospects to visit an existing customer’s facility near a conference location is one of the highest-converting tactics I heard discussed. When your existing customer and your prospect face similar challenges, the conversation that happens between them in a real clinical environment is more persuasive than any demo room. One marketing leader has built this into her standard pre-conference playbook.
- Micro-conferences over mega-events. One company is replacing their annual large customer conference with three smaller, specialty-focused events in the second half of the year. The logic: a pediatric group running one EHR has fundamentally different needs from a multi-site orthopedic center running another. A room full of only one of those audiences generates better peer conversation, more targeted content, and more immediate follow-through than a mixed audience of hundreds.
None of these approaches requires a large budget. Most of them require something harder: the discipline to get specific about whom you’re trying to reach and build backward from there.
The Operational Gap
Here’s what I believe separates the teams that consistently extract value from events from those that come away disappointed. And it has almost nothing to do with strategy.
It’s execution discipline. Specifically, the pre-event motion.
Meeting rooms only pay off when the sales team fills them before the show opens. Booths only convert when the follow-up is systematized, not improvised. One-on-one buyer programs are only worth the investment when both sides have genuinely opted into a relevant conversation, not when a prospect shows up for a free coffee and doesn’t read the briefing.
The teams reporting the strongest event outcomes this quarter treated pre-event outreach as the primary investment rather than an afterthought. Dimensional mail to targeted prospects. Personalized sequences that referenced the prospect’s specific context. The calendar holds are placed weeks before the show. The event itself was almost secondary. It was the occasion for a conversation that had already been set up.
One marketing leader summarized it cleanly: she dropped her HIMSS meeting room this year because her team wasn’t filling it proactively. The room wasn’t the problem. The discipline was. That’s an honest diagnosis that most teams won’t make, and it’s exactly why the gap between high-performing event programs and mediocre ones tends to persist.
Where This Is Heading
The direction of travel is clear: more intimacy, more targeting, more portfolio thinking.
The health tech companies getting the most out of events are treating face-to-face as a relationship-building medium, not a lead-generation exercise. They’re designing experiences that feel authentic rather than expensive. They’re using big shows for visibility and smaller events for depth. They’re measuring the portfolio, not the individual event. And they’re doing the unglamorous operational work: the pre-event outreach, the follow-up cadence, the CRM hygiene. Â This turns a good conversation at a booth into a deal a year later.
The rest of the industry is still trying to justify a 20×20 booth by counting badge scans.
The gap between those two approaches is widening. The good news is that closing it doesn’t require more budget. It requires a clearer point of view on who you’re trying to reach, why face-to-face matters for that specific relationship, and what you’re going to do the day after the show closes.
That’s the event strategy question worth asking right now.
These insights were drawn from two roundtable sessions with members of the Healthtech Marketing Network and a survey conducted in March 2026. All participants’ views are shared anonymously
