If you joined us in Cleveland in October for the 2021 Healthcare Design Expo & Conference, you may have experienced the same surreal feeling that I did. After planning, canceling, and then planning again, we finally made it across the finish line. Suddenly, there we were—in person.
Even with masks, distancing, and fist bumps, being together felt, well, normal. We recognized one another despite only seeing eyes and hair. We caught up on the professional and personal that we’d missed in one another’s lives. We went to sessions, walked the expo hall, and party hopped—somehow, even two years after our last HCD, we fell right back into the routine of it all.
And while not everything went according to plan, as nothing does in this pandemic environment, it was by all accounts a success. It was also a reminder of how much I missed being there, and with all of you.
For many of you, though, making the trip this time around just wasn’t doable. We get that. And I have a hunch come October 2022, we’ll be just as excited to gather again—in full force.
Meanwhile, we’re hoping to send a little taste of the live event your way through HCD On Demand, a free lineup of 11 sessions recorded at the show and available as webinars through the end of January. We hope it offers you the chance to earn some end-of-year CEUs or get a head start on 2022, all while feeling a sense of connection to the industry and HCD.
We’ll be building on those types of efforts, too. Like all of you, we strived over these long months to be nimble and responsive to our industry’s needs and explore new ways of answering them. And we’ve learned a lot about what we do best—content—and how best to deliver it to you. In fact, we believe in it so much that you may notice something a little different in this issue. As we move into the 2022 cycle of the Healthcare Design show, we’ll now be the Healthcare Design Conference + Expo, leading with “conference.”
And while every piece of content we produce is meant to inform and inspire your work, it’s really a cyclical process, as industry members graciously contribute to articles, conference sessions, webinars, and so on. In sharing your perspectives, experiences, and lessons learned, HCD is able to serve as the vehicle that disseminates that knowledge at large.
This is a “greater good” type of industry, and it’s been a pleasure collaborating on new ways to answer on our shared mission. Here’s to what’s to come as we collectively move forward. And I hope to see you soon.