Health care marketing conference

I'm in San Francisco this week for a health care marketing conference - I arrived Tuesday night and am leaving Sunday. Jason is flying here tomorrow from his own work obligations in Minneapolis, and we'll spend the rest of the weekend here.

After a quick, one-hour flight up after work Tuesday, I got to the hotel around 7:30 and decided to just unpack and settle in for the night. Once I was in my pajamas I ordered dinner via room service and watched TV from the comfortable king-sized bed!

Yesterday I attended a 3-hour pre-conference seminar about hospitals using their quality scores to market themselves and differentiate themselves from their competitors. It's a pretty timely topic since numerous federal and state agencies have begun requiring hospitals to report their patient safety and outcomes data, and much of this data is available to savvy consumers in the general public. After the session, a co-worker and I crashed a senior executive luncheon led by a member of the American Hospital Association, who gave a presentation on the status of the health care industry in America and what changes we might expect to see depending on which presidential candidate is elected in November.

At 5:00 yesterday I met up with my old boss, Jim, from Metropolitan Hospital. He and I, and his current staff (including the woman who was my boss at my very first internship in college) attended the "opening session" which featured a political satirist from Washington D.C. Pretty funny stuff. After the entertainment I met up with four of my co-workers for drinks in the hotel's 39th floor bar, and then we walked a few blocks to a restaurant called Lulus for dinner. After dinner we went to a reception with free dessert and drinks, and again got to catch up with some old co-workers and people in the industry I've met before. By the time I got to bed at midnight, I was exhausted!

Today was the first official day of the conference and most of the sessions I attended were fairly valuable. I'm done with the educational stuff for the day; at 6:00 I'm meeting up with all of my team and we're having dinner at an italian restaurant somewhere downtown...