HIMSS 2026 Day 3: Network, Network, Network

🤝 The Day That Was All About People

If Day 1 was about arriving and Day 2 was about the expo floor, Day 3 was about one thing and one thing only: networking. I woke up with a clear plan - skip the sessions, skip the booths, and focus entirely on conversations. And honestly? It was the best decision I made all week.

By mid-morning, I was already in deep conversations with people I'd been wanting to connect with. The sessions will be available online later. The connections you make face-to-face at a conference like HIMSS? Those are irreplaceable.

💼 C-Suite Conversations That Mattered

Met with CEOs and CTOs from a couple of major healthcare companies today. Not quick handshakes and business card exchanges - real, extended conversations about where the industry is headed. We talked about AI implementation timelines, the gap between what vendors promise and what actually works in clinical settings, the workforce crisis that nobody has a clean answer for, and the economics of digital transformation in a margin-squeezed industry.

What stood out is how candid these leaders were. Behind the polished keynote presentations, there's a lot of uncertainty. Most are navigating AI adoption with limited internal expertise, fragmented data infrastructure, and boards that want ROI numbers yesterday. The honesty was refreshing.

💬 LinkedIn: The Brand That Walks Ahead of You

This keeps happening and I still can't get over it. People are walking up to me at HIMSS and saying, “I follow you on LinkedIn” or “I saw your post about how you built 4 startups in 16 months.” Day 3 was the most intense day for this. Multiple introductions started with someone already knowing who I am and what I do before I even opened my mouth.

Here's why this matters: when you walk into a meeting and the other person already trusts you because of your content, the conversation starts at a completely different level. You skip the awkward small talk and the “so what do you do?” phase. You go straight into the real stuff. LinkedIn is essentially doing my introduction before I even show up in the room.

Honestly, thank you to everyone who follows my content and takes the time to connect in person. You're the reason I keep showing up online, even on days when it feels like nobody's watching. People are watching. They're just waiting for the right moment to tell you.

☕ Hall G: Where Snacks Meet Strategy

Shout out to HIMSS for keeping the snacks flowing in Hall G all day. Coffee stations, snack bars, and refreshment zones scattered throughout the hall made it easy to keep the energy going without having to leave the venue. This might sound like a small thing, but at a conference where you're on your feet for 8+ hours, it makes a massive difference.

More importantly, the snack and rest areas became some of the best networking spots. There's something about grabbing coffee next to a stranger that makes starting a conversation effortless. Some of my best connections today happened not in scheduled meetings or sessions, but in those informal zones where people are taking a breather and are genuinely open to chatting. The hallway conversations at conferences are always underrated.

🚀 Startup Pavilion: Reality Check

Walked through the startup area again today with fresh eyes. A few of them gave me this initial reaction of “why are they spending time on this?” But the more I talked to the founders, the more I realized that's exactly the point. These are startups. They're in the arena trying things, testing hypotheses, and seeing what sticks. Not every idea will be a unicorn, but the act of showing up at HIMSS with a booth, a pitch, and a vision takes guts.

Some of the most interesting conversations came from founders who were clearly still figuring out their product-market fit. They weren't polished. They didn't have perfect decks. But they had real insights about problems they'd seen firsthand in clinical settings, and they were building solutions from that experience. That's the kind of energy that drives healthcare innovation forward.

📈 The Biggest Gap I Noticed: Healthcare Marketing & AIO

Here's the observation that kept hitting me throughout the day. After meeting dozens of healthcare companies - from startups to enterprise players - one pattern became impossible to ignore: most of them are terrible at marketing. And I don't mean they have a bad logo or an outdated website. I mean they have virtually zero presence in AI-powered search and discovery.

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini about solutions in their category, and these companies don't exist. They have no AI Overview (AIO) presence whatsoever. In a world where buyers are increasingly using AI tools to research vendors, this is a massive blind spot.

The irony is painful. These companies are building cutting-edge AI products for healthcare, but they can't even get their own brand to show up in AI-generated search results. They're spending hundreds of thousands on conference booths but nothing on content strategy, thought leadership, or AIO optimization.

🔒 Cybersecurity: The Conversation That Won't Quit

Even on a day focused on networking, cybersecurity kept coming up in nearly every conversation. The Change Healthcare breach fallout is still reverberating through the industry. CTOs I spoke with described how that single incident changed their entire security posture and budget allocation overnight.

One recurring theme: organizations are moving from perimeter-based security to Zero Trust architectures, but the implementation complexity is enormous. Most health systems are running a mix of legacy and modern infrastructure, and getting Zero Trust to work across that landscape is a multi-year project. The cybersecurity companies at HIMSS this year are pitching faster timelines, but the CISOs I talked to are skeptical.

⏰ 4:30 PM Already? Where Did the Day Go?

After meeting what felt like an endless stream of people, I suddenly looked at my phone and it was already 4:30 PM. I hadn't eaten lunch. Hadn't checked email. Hadn't even looked at the session schedule. The entire day vanished into conversations, and I wouldn't change a thing about it.

Grabbed a late lunch, caught my breath, and started processing everything I'd heard throughout the day. The volume of insights, business cards, LinkedIn connection requests, and follow-up items from a single day of focused networking at HIMSS is staggering. It will take weeks to follow up on everything properly. But that's the sign of a day well spent.

🚶 14K Steps: Less Walking, More Talking

Today was 14K steps - less than the 17K average from the first two days. But the lower step count actually reflects a better day. Instead of rushing between venues and booths, I stayed put in conversations longer. Quality over quantity. Every step today led to a handshake, a business card, or a LinkedIn connection request. That's the HIMSS experience I came here for.

📅 My Day 3 Timeline

💡 Day 3 Bottom Line

Day 3 reminded me why conferences still matter in a world where everything is moving online. You can't replicate what happens when you sit across from a healthcare CEO for 20 minutes and talk about the real challenges they're facing. You can't replicate the feeling of someone walking up to you because they follow your LinkedIn content. You can't replicate the energy of a room full of people who are all trying to make healthcare better.

The healthcare marketing gap is real, and it's an enormous opportunity for anyone willing to take content seriously. The startup scene is scrappy and full of potential. And the personal brand I've been building on LinkedIn is paying dividends in ways I never expected.

One more day to go. Day 4 is the final push - and I plan to make it count.