If it's summer, The Educators are Meeting

It has been pointed out to me that my blog posts, during spring and summer conference and trade show travel, have dropped off to a nearly invisible level.

In my own defense: typing out posts about the cancer, biology, oncology, and other clinical science research and specialty medicine meetings on my calendar gets a bit repetitive. Especially for those who just aren't that jazzed by the latest development in customized gene therapies or sequencing speeds that boggle the mind, bring costs down for researchers, and eventually patients. New products, new proteins, new technologies, but no real bold-print, headline-grabbing buzz.

Now the longest day of the year is in the past and I am awash in education industry meetings. Educators meet during summer break - for obvious reasons. Less obvious is their taste for meeting locations that feature hot, sticky, humid weather and often minimal facilities. Budget conscious, I guess.

In any case: the big kahuna, The International Society for Technology in Education, is expecting over 18,000 attendees to plow through hundreds of booths offering, you guessed it, technology for education, and over 900 presentations presumably presenting positive ways to implement all that new tech. Atlanta, meeting the hot and humid directive, does feature fabulous facilities for all of these ed-tech geeks to meet, greet, and figure out how to get their favorite technology into budgets and classrooms, across the land.

School Nurses, the Online Curriculum Associations, Distance learning, Math teachers, Science curriculum specialists, College Financial Aid Officers, College Bursars, a plethora of Common Core and other curriculum working groups, school psychologists, principals, school boards, accredititation organzaiotns for every educational level and region, and many more educational specialty organizations, that I'll remember when I pull into San Antonio or Raleigh, are all meeting now, in late June and throughout July, with time off for fire works.

Each of these meetings has grown, is better attended, and has buzz, based directly on whether they are buying into the technology in schools buzz. If they aren't, they're still pretty small. Add automated health checks for students, empowering school bursars to auto debit fees, and voila, growing meetings and growing sales opportunities for the hundreds of start-ups flooding into the education technology space.

SJN Sales specializes in building sales for technology companies and service providers who leverage technology to make their customers' lives easier, more effective, and more profitable. Up until three years ago, SJN had one dedicated team that served all education specialty markets and those five people were plenty to handle demand on both tech companies wanting our services, and schools etc. needing what our clients were selling. Now everything has changed. SJN Sales has three full ed-tech teams and is hiring for a fourth. These specialized education market salespeople are in addition to the many SJN salespeople who sell security, infrastructure, and other enterprise solutions into schools and colleges.

Education technology is a market that has grown from a huge amount of money, a few years back when K12 and some of the earlier e-learning firms built sizable bases, to a start-up funding figure that, no-one agrees on as a number but all agree exceeds the total capitalization of several pretty developed countries.

Online resource explosion, 1 to 1 computing commitments at schools from preschool through university, Common Core (love it or hate it, everyone's got a new curriculum or tool for CC), STEM initiatives and their attractive funding bait, and perhaps most importantly, the realization that teachers decide what technology actually gets used in their classroom, have made one to one sales, based on relationships and knowledge of the whole education market landscape, including budgets, politics, and how both really work, critical to the success of every ed-tech vendor hoping to gain enough marketshare to stay in business, and grow.

I'm on the road with our education technology teams and I promise I'll report back with the latest developments and some predictions for what will sell and how SJN Sales will select the right ed-tech clients for the next years of change in US classrooms. 

HIMMS Orlando. Big Meeting. Big Announcements

The annual HIMMS meeting is on the must-attend annual meeting list for all SJN Sales healthcare team member calandars. There is simply no bigger, or better organized, way of checking in with the broadest spectrum of healthcare leaders, vendors, technology, and policy innovators. All in one place. A very crowded, map and game-plan required place. But its Orlando so we know its nice outside. There is no-one outside.

Sessions for everyone from those responsible for physicians coding patient data into the latest and greatest Patient Record Management systems, are especially popular. Now that EMR (Electronic Medical Records) are pretty much pervasive in provider organizations, good tips on how to get doctors and others who don't interact with th syste daily, or easily, are all the rage. I guess its no surprise that providers who see 50-60 patients a day, and enter the system to order tests, add chart notes, etc. get comfortable and faster, with an EMR than the specialist or even part-timer who enters his login far less frequently.

Technology innovations this year seem focused on making meaningful use, easy to achieve through easy to use solutions. What may seem obvious to an SJN Sales IT managed services provider or solutions developer, has been, as a rule, pretty slow to arrive in healthcare. There is still plenty of room to innovate by creating better UI, easier work flow steps, and more intuitive data entry.

It will take the rest of the week to chat with all the vendors and report on the really NEW, new solutions. But efficiency and ease of use, especially where coding comes in, are likely to be big take-aways at this meeting.

It's early. The first full day really so I feel certain that the exhibit hall will see more action as the various learning tracks leave time to explore.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is the Keynote Speaker on Wednesday -- Don't count on a seat if you haven't already registered. I think it says a great deal about the policy importance, as well as the high-level influence of attendees, that the keynote trnascends meaningful use, ICD10, and the other nitty-gritty topics we're hearing about in every nook and cranny of the Orlando Convention Center.

Have a good day. Call us if you're here and want to meet.