HealthDataCon 2026: 24 Hours. One World. One Health Data Community.
August 27, 2026
Dear Fellows,
For those I have not yet had the opportunity to meet, I’m Ken Deans, President & CEO of Health Sciences South Carolina, the parent company of Health Data Management. I have had the privilege of working with many of you already, some for as many as 30+ years, while others, I haven’t had the pleasure of even meeting yet. That will soon change, and I look forward to getting to know many more of you as we together continue building the College and the broader Health Data Management community.
I’m writing today because we are about to try something ambitious—and I would very much request your direct support as Fellows, in helping us build it.
On October 15–16, 2026, Health Data Management will launch the inaugural HealthDataCon 2026, a 24-hour, live global virtual conference built around a simple idea:
24 Hours. One World. One Health Data Community.
Rather than asking an international community to organize itself around a U.S. workday, HealthDataCon is being designed to work around it, and effectively, follow the sun. Beginning in the United States with The Americas block, we will follow the sun from East to West, where programming will effectively hand off approximately every eight hours from one region of the world to the next—moving from The Americas to Asia-Pacific (APAC) and then to Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA)—to form one continuous 24-hour global conversation.
Importantly, this is not intended to be an American conference simply broadcast to the rest of the world. As programming moves from one region to another, we want the conversation to move with it. Content should be meaningfully curated for the region in which it is being presented—reflecting its healthcare systems, priorities, challenges, innovations and voices.
The virtual conference platforms we are evaluating also support closed captioning and translation across many major languages. Accordingly, where it makes sense for a regional program, we welcome and encourage proposals for presentations delivered in languages other than English. A genuinely global health-data community should not require every conversation to originate in the United States—or necessarily to occur in English.
As a Fellow of the American College of Health Data Management (ACHDM), your participation in HealthDataCon 2026 is complimentary. It will become one of the many expanded benefits we will be soon also be announcing, separately. HealthDataCon is not just for Fellows, however. We will open registration domestically and internationally to non-Fellows, essentially all interested health care leaders, and we ultimately expect the broader health-data community to likely represent the majority of attendees.
As the program takes shape, we will be announcing speakers, sessions, regional programming and other conference developments on a continuing basis. Even before formally registering for the conference, I encourage you upon finishing reading this, to create a simple login account directly on the HealthDataCon2026.com site, so we can keep you informed. All HealthDataCon communication will come from that site. It requires only a name and email address; after signing up, simply click the verification email that should arrive within minutes in your inbox, to activate your conference specific account. Because you are fellows, once you do that, we will take it from there and escalate your account to your attendee and Fellow status, again, at no additional cost to you as an existing Fellow.
For Fellows, that initial complimentary account is all you need to establish your presence on the conference site. Because Fellows receive complimentary access to the full conference, both this one and those to come in the future, we will ensure behind the scenes that your Fellow status is recognized at the appropriate access level.
Today, though, I am reaching out specifically to our Fellows because I would also like you to help us build the event.
We have now opened the HealthDataCon 2026 “Call for Proposals” for both individual presentations and panel discussions. We are looking for substantive, practical and forward-looking perspectives across our five pillars:
DATA • INTELLIGENCE • INFORMATICS • TECHNOLOGY • IMPACT
We are particularly interested in proposals grounded in real experience, evidence, implementation, emerging practice and measurable impact—not commercial presentations or product pitches. Sticking to our academic medical lineage, we should intentionally seek to remain evidence-based. International and comparative perspectives are especially welcome, as are ideas that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries.
We have deliberately made the submission process concise. Plus, we know what works and what doesn’t in this industry. I know we know, because we all read and write about it daily. Most proposals should take no more than 10, maybe 15 minutes, to complete and submit.
Priority submission deadline: September 8, 2026
Final submission deadline: September 12, 2026
Given the short runway, these Speaker/Panel Proposals will be reviewed on a rolling basis, and some program slots may be filled before the final deadline, so I strongly encourage you to submit early.
SUBMIT A HEALTHDATACON 2026 PROPOSAL
I also want to be candid about what we are doing. This is very intentionally a trial run for something to come, that will be much larger. We are assembling this inaugural event on an extraordinarily compressed timeline, and I fully expect a few hiccups along the way. Inaugural events are rarely perfect, and our objective is not to allow perfect to get in the way of good.
We believe deeply in the concept of a learning health system. It is central to the work of Health Sciences South Carolina, its partners, and Health Data Management’s following and I think the same philosophy should apply here: try something meaningful, learn from it, improve it, adapt, ideate and prove that the concept can work. If we do that well in October, we will have created the foundation for something considerably larger.
By the way, we are currently anticipating a minimum of three HealthDataCon events in 2027: likely a smaller event during the first half of the year, a substantially larger flagship event around the middle, and another smaller event later in the year. We have proposed dates for all three, but I am not quite ready to announce them until they are firm. We will announce them at HealthDataCon 2026. Please stay tuned…
Therefore, this also means that if we cannot accommodate your proposal in October, please do not be discouraged. Strong proposals may be carried forward for consideration as we build the expanded 2027 programs.
For now, I hope you will do two things: hold October 15–16 on your calendar and consider what expertise, experience or perspective you might contribute to this first HealthDataCon.
Most importantly, though, I hope many of you will join Mitchell Jospehenson, the President of the College, and me, not simply as attendees or presenters, but as founding participants in shaping what HealthDataCon can become. We already have Fellows around the world. This is an opportunity to build an event that begins to look, sound and think like the global community we aspire to be. The health care and health data challenges we face daily are not only local. They are indeed global.
I’m excited to see what we can create together.
Best regards,
Kenneth R. Deans Jr., DHA, MBA, eFACHDM
President & CEO
Health Sciences South Carolina
Health Data Management
American College of Health Data Management
