A full house in Vegas—for HIMSS

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society is on track to reach door-busting, record attendance figures at its annual show later this month, according to H. Stephen Lieber, the Chicago-based healthcare IT industry trade group's president and CEO.

Registration for the Las Vegas show opened last September, Lieber said, and “from the first week, registration has been running on average 20% above any point in time last year. If things hold, we're looking at, probably, a 17% increase over last year. It's kind of like elections, you don't count it until you get it, but I feel very confident we're going to see double-digit increases in our attendance” over a record 31,255 mark set last year in Orlando, Fla.

Lieber said a total attendance projection of 35,000 to 37,000 “is a realistic estimate.”

With two weeks to go until show time—the convention runs Feb. 20-24—provider registration numbers are up 16% to 17% over last year, he said, while vendor registrations are up 18% to 19%

“I wish we had a bigger hall,” Lieber said. Vendors' space sold out three weeks ago, with 275 companies exhibiting for the first time.

“The vendor community is pulling out all of the stops to get in front of this community,” he said. “We're not seeing market consolidation yet.”

One thing HIMSS won't run out of is hotel rooms.

“We are at the most number of hotel rooms we've ever booked,” he said, but there's plenty more room at the city's mega-inns.

“That's the nice thing about Vegas, it's really not an issue,” Lieber said. “It actually makes it a whole lot easier. We're dealing with 12 to 15 hotels” rather than the 70 or 80 needed to house conventioneers at any other city.

“We'll have a contract for 4,000 to 5,000 rooms in the same hotel,” he said. “You just don't have that anywhere else.”

Follow Joseph Conn on Twitter @MHJConn.