Second Meeting of the Medical/Healthcare Travel Task Force, 22 Apr 2011

A second meeting of the Medical/Healthcare Travel Task Force was chaired by Gary Sain, Orlando/Central Florida Convention & Visitors Bureau and hosted by Rick Walsh, the Knob Hill Group.

Mission: To position Orlando as an epicenter for medical education, training and research.

One of the deliverables of this meeting was to settle on a tasking to UCF researchers:

“To develop an asset map/inventory of programs, companies, industry clusters, health care and educational institutions and resources that together make the Metro Orlando area the world’s logical leading destination for medical education and training”.

Conversation Points Summary:

It isn’t about marketing Orlando.  It is about making Orlando where people turn on this broad topic because there is so much of it here.  We should attempt to market this as you would a disruptive technology asset.

Need to identify the convergence of what these companies, institutes, hospitals, etc. do?  This is a symbiotic cluster of mini clusters (Convention Center, Medical City, Nicholson Institute, etc.); integrate them into a broader base. 

Orlando—where technology and tourism meet.   

Need to include physical assets, as well as programmatic, related clusters, educational offerings. 

This is a great destination … and by the way, we have all these assets, too.  We are the new meeting place of the 21st Century...  or … learning place.

Target for Nicholson Institute is chief professional education officer of medical/specialty societies, marketing across six specialties in partnership with manufacturers.

Have to convince the core that this is about education … being the place to learn in the place you love to play.

Same assets that have made Orlando the top medical meetings destination overshadow New York (World Product Center), Cleveland (Medical Mart), Nashville (nation’s largest health care cluster), but no one here knows what they are.  Hotels, F&B, airport and other assets are the only things others try to compete with us.  We need to put medical and life sciences/education assets into the mix and we will win.

We need to develop a new template for educating all those we want to attract, whereby when we communicate they see advantages they can’t get anywhere else.

We need a brand that stands … don’t change us, but define us. Needs to be broader than bio-med.

Where the world convenes for training … an education destination across industries.

Solve the “I didn’t know that ...” problem by knowing what we want them to know and being out front of the problem ... telling the story on a regular basis through a variety of tools, media, etc.

What would a catalog of our assets look like and who would it be for?  It needs to include allied industries (simulation and training, medical devices).  Once in hand, need to educate our communities, as well.

An Orlando-based meeting (summit and trade show) on the topic of medical education (the likes of I/ITSEC) could help establish the reputation.