STAT’s Mohana Ravindranath and Annalisa Merelli will be at HLTH in Las Vegas and will be writing a daily email dispatch from the meeting. Sign up here to get it.
Health leaders are jetting to Las Vegas this weekend for a meeting they say is crucial for clinching new deals and cooking up new startups — all while mingling with TV personalities, social media influencers, musicians and ten thousand other health care professionals on the industry’s flashiest exhibitor floor.
It’s the sixth year of the HLTH conference, which draws high profile names from companies like Verily, Amazon, and 23andMe; venture giants like Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz; and hospitals, payers and startups hungry for new partnerships, funding and paying customers. A few hundred more attendees are signed up this year compared to last, and this year, more than others, organizers tell STAT they’ll nudge attendees to think about their impact on “humanity”: that is, how best to improve health care overall, beyond their bottom lines.
It’s not just the network that boosts attendance. It’s also savvy branding, like custom caricatures for speakers and appearances by health-adjacent celebrities. Musician and actor Nick Jonas, a type 1 diabetes patient, will discuss his health journey with STAT reporter Nicholas St. Fleur. Also slated to speak: Chelsea Clinton, founder of health and learning venture firm Metrodora Ventures; TV personality Howie Mandel, who has promoted OCD tech company NOCD; and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, who launched stress-busting behavior change tech company Thrive Global. Ashanti and Fat Joe headline the evening industry reception Tuesday.
Scheduled panels will tackle hard-driving topics like the burgeoning market for online weight loss drug prescriptions, Amazon’s hotly anticipated plans in health care, and, for the first time at HLTH, oral health. But it’s the in-between moments that might lead to concrete business deals, longtime attendees told STAT.
“I get ideas at some of the panels, but the best part of the conference is talking to a variety of different people which happens in the halls,” Amy Abernethy, president of product development and chief medical officer at Alphabet life sciences spinout Verily, told STAT. “Last year, at least three different new companies showed me their product concepts using one or two slides on their phone while we were standing in the hallway.”
Google Health sees HLTH as a way to explore new partnerships — like generative AI development deals it has with EHR company MEDITECH and the Mayo Clinic — or a misinformation-eliminating campaign it runs with the World Health Organization, chief clinical officer Michael Howell told STAT. Chronic condition tech company Omada Health’s chief medical officer Carolyn Jasik said she goes to find like-minded clinicians working at payers, startups, venture firms and Big Tech companies. Dan Brillman, CEO of community care coordinating focused software company Unite Us, said he attends the conference in the hopes of finding payer and community organizations to work with.
A sprinkling of entertainment makes the event less stodgy, encouraging freeform discussions, said Neil Carpenter, a health care consultant who advises a handful of startups part-time and who has attended HLTH twice in past years. “Yes, there’s a lot of show there, but there’s also a weird informality that leads to a little less posturing.”
Unlike investment-focused, invite-only conferences like JP Morgan’s health care gathering in January, HLTH organizers emphasize that the event is geared toward a wide range of attendees: patients, founders, and employers, among others. About a third of attendees are in C-suite or comparable positions, organizers told STAT.
But at roughly $4,000 for general attendees and sponsors, not everyone who wants to be there can afford to. Government employees and startups are eligible for up to a 60% discount, but it remains out of reach for some cash-strapped founders who still have to pay for travel and lodging. Social media influencers with an aggregate following of 50,000 can apply for free admission, in addition to journalists.
Critics argue that celebrity performances and lavish sponsored networking parties are at odds with efforts to reduce health care’s soaring costs. At about $12,000 per person, U.S. health care spending is nearly twice as high as the next closest country, Germany, according to a Commonwealth Fund Analysis of 2021 data. HLTH organizers would not discuss financial details about the event’s budget or sponsorships.
Autumn Zhu, founder of AI-guided Medicaid navigation startup Odyssey, told STAT she attended HLTH last year but chose not to return, since potential partners and Medicaid patients she’d hoped to connect with weren’t there.
“This year I just asked myself, ‘is this really going to get me in front of the people I want to serve?’ and the answer is just clearly ‘no,’” she said. “Is the community-based hospital or a FQHC [federally qualified health center] or a busy hospital exec going to be at HLTH? No, they’re going to be at other conferences.”
While she was thrilled and surprised to see rapper Ludacris perform at the conference last year, she added, “how much did it cost out of our tickets to get him there?”
Carpenter, who advises Odyssey, said he’s not buying a ticket to HLTH this year, but he’ll still go to the after-conference networking events in Las Vegas, which he’s found to be most helpful in finding new advising opportunities, investors and potential customers. But he told another early stage company he advises — automated medication assistant Pharmesol — to attend, despite the steep cost.
“They’ve got a good product, and got enough funding to build the product, but the market largely doesn’t know who they are,” Carpenter said. “Go meet investors, get your name out, because you have a window of opportunity before Epic and Google and everybody else just crushes you,” he told them, adding that they’d be better positioned to fend off big tech companies coming out with competing products once they had better name recognition.
Asked about the event’s glitzy image, HLTH founder and CEO Jonathan Weiner said it was designed to be “experiential,” and that the group was “OK with creating a forum that attracts the brightest minds in the industry in a setting that generates excitement.”
“We create an experience that people will remember. If people want to call that glitz and glamor, that is OK with us because people remember these experiences that they will share with their colleagues, prospects, clients, friends and family,” he said.