On the Summit trail

The 2015 HME News Business Summit, Sept. 13-15 in Nashville, may be more than seven months away, but it has already become a daily part of my to-do list.

I've started making calls to past attendees, asking them what would be their dream session.

I've also started reaching out locally, to area universities (Vanderbilt University) and to area healthcare groups (the Nashville Health Care Council). Nashville is quite the healthcare hub, so I'm hoping to bring in a big gun or two that you won't hear from anywhere else.

But back to my conversations with past attendees.

I talked with a past attendee earlier this week who complimented the M&A-related sessions we have at the Summit pretty much every year. Last year, this session took the form of a panel of investors and bankers.

This attendee suggested: “To follow on that, what if you had some sort of CFO expert? I mean, I can say, 'OK, to build value, I need to drive EBITDA.' Well how do I do that? I'm no financial wizard. What are all the key levers I need to be pulling?”

This sort of dovetails with a session idea I've been toying with about how to look at your HME company like an analyst. Am I onto something here?

Another attendee suggested a deeper dive into how to streamline workflow with technology.

“How can we take our workflow that we have in our operations and streamline it?” he said. “What middleware is out there that can connect some of these IT systems that we all use? We need something to stop making errors and to alleviate the extraordinary cost of those errors. Some systems have the workflow we're looking for, but they're not as robust as they need to be.”

Anyone else feel this attendee's pain?

The Summit is your event, so don't hesitate to drop me a line at ebeaulieu@hmenews.com. What's your dream session?