Are you there, Patient? It’s me, Patient.

There continues to be a voracious feed of healthcare and health-related expos, trade shows, conferences, symposia, and summits pervading my feed.

The majority have chosen to embed some variant of the flaccid platitude “#patient” into their title and imbued allure to elicit sponsor dollars and attendees paid to be there by their employer.

With over two decades in this space, it continues to astonish — and yet not surprise me — at the myopic and utterly missed opportunity of — perhaps maybe — inviting and including actual patients, patient leaders, health experience experts, and advocacy leadership to the mainstage to contribute and support shared goals and objectives.

A radical idea from Captain Obvious, I know.

With clear exceptions notwithstanding, this sector’s entire conference industry continues to fail to recognize the intrinsic economic benefits of monetized, enterprise-level patient experience in thought leadership.

And it is this systemic groupthink that adds nitrous oxide to the status quo, undermines progress, and diminishes the advocate’s voice.

It also focuses all the blame on that patient in crisis who does not somehow intrinsically know to “ask their doctor” whether this or that is right for their moderate-to-severe Stage IV metastatic breast cancer.

“Are there any dinosaurs on your dinosaur tour?” — Jurassic Park

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein

But I digress and present, with maximum comment, an actual slide from a recent industry Keynote presentation I gave.