As an event organiser, there is always a growing sense of anticipation that builds to a crescendo before the start of an event, followed by acute excitement during its delivery and, hopefully, a sense of achievement and value delivered afterwards. This week, we welcomed hundreds of delegates to participate in HBI 2024, marking yet another milestone in our journey. To all those who attended—our sponsors, speakers, partners, and of course, our delegates—we sincerely thank you. Your participation made this event a success. Stay tuned for session videos, presentations, photos, and write-ups, which will soon be available to extend vital opportunities for shared learnings post-event. This conference also provided the perfect platform to announce three significant changes for HBI 2025, which will take place in Paris in late March. These changes are designed to enhance the event experience, reflecting our commitment to continuous improvement and growth.

A couple of weeks ago we welcomed hundreds of delegates to take part in HBI 2024.

The first thing to say is a sincere thank you to all those who attended, and in particular to our sponsors, speakers and partners, and of course all the delegates without whom we could not have made this event a success. Look out for the full range of session videos, presentations, photos and write-ups that we will publish soon to extend vital opportunities for shared learnings, post-event.

The conference afforded the perfect opportunity to announce three significant changes that we are making ahead of HBI 2025. 

Firstly, HBI 2025 will take place in Paris in late March.

We will be building on the Executive Meeting Suite experience launched at this year’s conference, as we go even further to provide exclusive private meeting spaces to help you secure conversations and get deals done. 

We will also be broadening the scope of our coverage to better reflect the interests of the market.

Many delegates I spoke to this week were understandably curious to know why we are making these changes. We are moving the conference back to its original home in the calendar in spring to avoid what has become a very congested June schedule.

Why Paris?

We are taking the conference to Paris because we have the ambition to grow the volume of delegates from hundreds to over one thousand – I will expand more on the reasons for that later. This, together with the initiation of the dedicated executive meetings floor, creates a need for more space.

London has some big exhibition spaces for trade shows, but there are no convention spaces suitable for our conference community larger than those that we have already used, for us to grow into. 

Paris provides accessibility by train for delegates throughout Europe. The city also provides a beautiful backdrop in which to get away from everyday business-as-usual concerns, to spur deep strategic thinking and inspire lively networking. 

Why a dedicated meeting space?

Dedicated meeting spaces provide structure for time-poor executives to run efficiently organised meetings for deal-making, partnering, making presentations and much more. 

Why broaden our coverage?

The plan to broaden the scope of our coverage is about following the interests of our community both in terms of new sectors of interest and new topics. This will expand opportunities for learning and networking with a wider group of people across the healthcare ecosystem. HBI should reflect the market opportunities and key topics that are important to the industry. Our role is to keep up with the needs and strategies of investors and healthcare companies who are diversifying their revenue streams and seeking new avenues of growth. 

For example, covering Pharma Services, where there are big investment and diversified revenue opportunities for diagnostics services following a boom in clinical trial funding. This represents a natural fit as we’ve already seen laboratory groups diversifying into CROs, for example Europe’s top five lab groups Synlab, Cerba, Sonic, Unilabs and Biogroup all have sizable pharma services businesses. 

Growing into adjacent sectors will enable us to bring more healthcare CEOs into the room, which in turn amplifies the opportunities for our existing community to network, learn and thrive.  

Our mission is to support healthcare executives, investors, advisors and suppliers to make the right connections and to help them to make better informed strategic and investment decisions. Increasing the volume of delegates while maintaining the high-levels of executives in the community is paramount for us to be able to deliver even more value to the industry. 

We are deeply conscious of the need to bring our existing community with us as we embark on this journey of change. We will continue to serve and even double down on core markets such as private hospitals, diagnostics, care, and a multitude of outpatient specialities. 

For those in the HBI community who are London based, please look out for details which we will be sharing in due course about opportunities to start your HBI 2025 conference experience early on HBI-Eurostar.

We look forward to welcoming both new friends and familiar faces to HBI 2025 in Paris in March to build a bigger and better community and to deliver even more opportunities and value.  

If you have any thoughts or comments about changes we’re making for HBI 2025 I’d be delighted to hear from you.