How HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition Runs 790+ Sessions and 1,100+ Speakers in One Platform

At a glance

Company: HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition — one of the largest gatherings in health information and technology. 

Team: 20+ internal users across marketing, content production, operations, and sponsorship fulfillment. 

Relationship: Year three on Sessionboard. 

The challenge: A flagship conference run across disconnected spreadsheets, manual email, and multiple systems — with no single record of truth for speakers, sessions, or content. 

The solution: Sessionboard as the single system of record for the full speaker lifecycle — intake through post-event — integrated with Swapcard, Freeman Orchestrate, and InGo. 

The result: 791 accepted sessions and 1,140 accepted speakers managed in one place, 280+ hours of staff time saved, and the team's first-ever run of call-for-proposals, evaluation, and session-survey workflows.

The numbers from HIMSS26

• 791 accepted sessions managed in one system
• 1,140 accepted speakers across the program
• 280+ hours of staff time saved across speaker updates, agreements, and agenda embeds
• 200 speaker agreements collected and routed to speaker portals — ~66 hours saved
• 365 speaker-information updates handled through self-service submissions instead of email — ~60 hours saved
• 23 sessions and speaker embeds replacing manual landing-page edits — ~46 hours saved
• 55 student ambassadors onboarded for communications, agreements, and travel logistics — ~110 hours saved
• 29 evaluation plans producing 802 evaluations, coordinated across 55 volunteer reviewers

From many systems to one source of truth

For years, HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition ran one of the largest conferences in health technology the way most large events still run: across multiple systems, layered spreadsheets, and manual email threads. The expertise and the programming were never the problem. The problem was that the information lived everywhere at once — and nowhere in particular.

When the team stepped back to evaluate its whole event technology strategy, it saw the opportunity to consolidate and optimize. The question wasn't "which tool patches this one gap?" It was "what can carry the entire speaker and content lifecycle in one place, and scale with us as the program grows?"

"We were looking at our event technologies as a whole — across the whole event — and used the opportunity to onboard Sessionboard. What attracted us to the solution was its all-in-one component, the ability to scale with our content programming, and being able to manage the speaker lifecycle in one place, including communications." — [Elizabeth George, Senior Digital Program Manager], HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition / Informa Connect

That decision made Sessionboard the team's record of truth for all things content — the place where 20+ people across marketing, content production, operations, and sponsorship fulfillment could finally work from a single source of information.

What changed in year three

HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition is now in its third year on the platform, and the compounding return is the part worth paying attention to. Each year, platform improvements let the team build on the last—refining workflows and rolling out solutions that benefit speakers while freeing content producers and operations managers to focus on the event itself.

"We're in year three, and with the improvements to the platform, we're able to continuously improve upon the previous year and implement solutions that benefit our speakers — and allow our team of content producers and operations managers to deliver the best event we can." — [Elizabeth George, Senior Digital Program Manager], HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition / Informa Connect

For HIMSS26, that meant going further than ever before.

Running call for proposals and evaluations for the first time

HIMSS26 was the first year the team leveraged Sessionboard's call-for-proposals and evaluation tools. They used them to gather and review content for several programs — including a smaller, topic-focused call for content and entries to the Emerge Pitch Competition for investors and startups.

The evaluation side ran at real scale: 29 evaluation plans produced 802 total evaluations, coordinated across 55 volunteer reviewers. Standing up a review process that size by hand would have meant weeks of spreadsheet wrangling and email chasing. Instead, reviewers worked in one place — and said so.

"I will be happy to perform more reviews, as needed. The new platform was efficient and easy to use." – Reviewer feedback, HIMSS26

Where the hours actually went

The reason a 20-person team can run a program this size comes down to the disappearance of manual work.

Speaker information stayed current without email. 365 speakers submitted updates to their own information through the platform. Every one of those would otherwise have been an email to someone on the team to action by hand. At even 10 minutes each, that's roughly 60 hours back.

Agreements collected themselves. The team collected 200 speaker agreements, each automatically assigned to the speaker's portal. At 20 minutes per individual DocuSign setup, that's about 66 hours saved.

Embeds replaced landing-page edits. 23 sessions and speaker embeds pulled live content straight onto the event’s website pages instead of requiring manual updates. At roughly 2 hours of edits per landing page, that's another 46 hours.

Student ambassadors plugged straight in. The team onboarded 55 student ambassadors and used Sessionboard to streamline their communications, agreements, and flight itineraries — about 110 hours saved across the group.

Add it up, and that's more than 280 hours of staff time returned to higher-value work — before counting the 110 hours of volunteer reviewer effort the evaluation tools helped coordinate. That is just the beginning of the time saved!

A connected stack, not a walled garden

Speaker and content management don't happen in isolation, so HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition runs Sessionboard alongside the rest of its event stack rather than forcing everything into a single monolith. Sessionboard integrates with Swapcard and Freeman Orchestrate, so each system does what it does best while the speaker record stays consistent across all of them."

The payoff is a single source of truth that the whole team trusts, without sacrificing the specialized tools each function already relies on.

A first: session surveys, in a single record

HIMSS26 also marked the first time the team brought session survey data into Sessionboard. They loaded all their survey results into the session record using custom fields — then sent that feedback to speakers directly through Sessionboard in a single email, instead of compiling and sending it manually via Outlook.

It's a small workflow with an outsized signal: the platform is becoming the place where everything about a session lives, from proposal to post-event feedback.

Why this matters

HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition's story is what speaker management looks like when it stops being a per-event scramble and becomes infrastructure. By consolidating the speaker lifecycle — intake, agreements, communications, evaluations, embeds, and now survey feedback — into one record of truth, a 20-person team runs a program of nearly 800 sessions and over 1,100 speakers, improves it every year, and gives both speakers and volunteer reviewers an experience they're glad to come back to.

That's the difference between managing an event and building a system that scales with one.

See it for your program

Sessionboard gives event teams one place to manage the full speaker lifecycle — from the call for proposals through post-event — and integrates with the event stack you already use. [Request a demo →]