HCEA Debuts List of Bellwether Events
Staff -- Tradeshow Week, 7/2/2007
The Healthcare Convention & Exhibitors Assn. has inaugurated its HCEA 100, a list of health care events that it calls the most significant in the industry.
"The impetus was to see what the leading conventions are telling us about our business," said Frank Skinner, HCEA market research analyst.
The list, available online at www.hcea.org, is primarily — albeit not exclusively — populated by meetings with the highest attendance in 27 different medical specialties. During a presentation at the recent HCEA Annual Meeting, held June 9–12 in Philadelphia, Skinner unveiled the list and a study of the performance of those events over the last 10 years, compared with that of all health care shows held in the United States.
While the indexes of HCEA 100 meetings and the totality of U.S. health care events mirrored one another by most measures — showfloor size, number of exhibitors and exhibiting costs, for instance — there was a greater disparity between the larger shows and all shows in terms of attendance growth. While attendance for HCEA 100 shows grew 16.7 percent between 1997 and 2006, attendance at all shows dipped during the same period by 2.2 percent.
"That's the one thing that jumped off the page when we looked at it," Skinner said.
He said the difference could be attributed to the economic slowdown of the first part of this decade and the accompanying decision by many in the health care industry to reduce the number of events they attended. Many opted to go to larger national events and cut back their participation in smaller state or regional meetings.
"When the economy slows down, there's more discretion in which shows they go to," Skinner said.
Of the 100 events on the HCEA 100, 13 are also on the most recent Tradeshow Week 200 (which is a measure of the total net square footage of tradeshows). There are also seven health care shows on the TSW 200 that did not appear on the HCEA 100, three of them dental shows and three that would be considered international events (such as the BIO Annual Convention).
The HCEA 100 includes what Skinner said his association considers events of national, rather than international, importance. He also pointed out that dentistry is the health care sector with the largest number of events.
"If you did a list based on highest attendance alone, 25 percent of the list would be dental shows," Skinner said.
