CHIME Fall Forum 2026: Dates, Location, Audience, and Exhibit Strategy

What the CHIME Fall Forum 2026 Is

The CHIME Fall Forum is the annual flagship meeting of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), the executive membership organization for senior US health system IT leaders. The 2026 edition runs November 11-14, 2026 at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center in Aurora, Colorado, immediately outside Denver. The Fall Forum has moved cities in recent years — Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego — and the 2026 Denver edition is the first time it has landed at the Gaylord Rockies, a campus large enough to host CHIME's general sessions, peer roundtables, and Foundation Firm meetings under one roof.

CHIME is not a general IT conference. Membership is restricted to senior health IT executives at provider organizations, and the Fall Forum's session content, peer programming, and floor design all reflect that. There are no general IT-staff badges, no clinical-only attendees, and no consumer health pavilions. The attendee base is approximately 1,100 people, which includes sponsors. Roughly 85 percent of attendees have direct purchasing authority over the enterprise IT, cybersecurity, EHR optimization, AI, and analytics investments that flow through their health system. Every conversation on the floor is with a decision-maker, which is the structural advantage CHIME has over every other show in the category.

Want the full conference profile — scoring, audience composition, geography, and how CHIME fits inside the broader US health IT conference calendar? See our CHIME 2026 conference profile for the structured data and exhibitor-grade specs.

CHIME Fall Forum 2026: The Numbers at a Glance

Note the absence of a free or low-tier exhibit option. CHIME does not run a HIMSS-style 10x10 startup row. The minimum credible footprint is a sponsorship package that includes branded peer-roundtable presence or product theater time, and the smaller booth options are typically reserved for first-time exhibitors who have already cleared the membership-relationship bar.

Who Actually Attends the CHIME Fall Forum 2026

The CHIME audience is unusually homogeneous by design. CHIME membership requires a senior health IT executive title and a provider-side employer — health system, hospital, large medical group, or integrated delivery network. The result is an attendee population that looks almost nothing like HIMSS, ViVE, or HLTH:

• Chief Information Officers — the dominant persona; system-level CIOs and division-level CIOs from large multi-hospital networks.
• Chief Medical Information Officers (CMIOs) — physician executives leading EHR optimization, clinical decision support, and ambient documentation programs.
• Chief Nursing Information Officers (CNIOs) — nursing executives leading workflow technology and clinical communication platform decisions.
• Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) — infrastructure, cloud, and platform leaders.
• Chief Digital Officers and Chief Innovation Officers — health system digital transformation leaders increasingly central to ambient AI, virtual care, and patient experience programs.
• Foundation Firm representatives — vendor executives in CHIME's multi-year partnership program.

There are no clinical attendees, no general IT staff, no payer-side representatives, and very few hospital marketing or operations executives. If your buying committee runs through the CIO's office, this is the highest-density room you will find all year. If your product sells through clinical KOLs, value analysis committees, or service-line directors, CHIME is the wrong show — invest your dollars in HIMSS or in a clinical society meeting instead. For the broader hospital executive audience, see our C-suite hospital marketing playbook.

CHIME Fall Forum 2026 vs. HIMSS vs. ViVE

The three meetings that get conflated most often — and that account for the bulk of US health system IT marketing spend — are HIMSS, ViVE, and the CHIME Fall Forum. They are structurally different events with different ROI profiles.

• HIMSS Global Conference (March): 30,000-40,000 attendees, broad health IT audience, large floor with 1,000+ exhibitors. Volume play. Strong for awareness, lead capture at scale, and product launch announcements.
• ViVE (February/March): 7,000-8,000 attendees, co-produced by CHIME and HLTH. Heavy startup and digital health weight alongside enterprise buyers. Turnkey booth model that flattens setup cost. Strong for innovation positioning and pairing C-suite conversations with investor and partnership meetings.
• CHIME Fall Forum (November): 1,100 attendees, exclusively C-level health system IT. No volume play possible. Strong for deep relationship work with specific CIO targets and for executing on multi-year Foundation Firm partnerships.

The math that surprises most first-time CHIME exhibitors: cost per qualified CIO conversation is typically lower at the Fall Forum than at HIMSS even though per-booth pricing is higher, because there is essentially no badge-scan noise. Every conversation is with a senior decision-maker. HIMSS still wins on raw conversation volume — see our HIMSS conference marketing strategy for how to play that show — but for CIO-office-driven enterprise sales cycles, CHIME consistently produces the highest pipeline yield per dollar spent.

Sponsorship Tiers, Booth Costs, and Foundation Firm Tracks

CHIME does not publish a public sponsor price list. The current pricing structure for the Fall Forum 2026 — confirmed against the most recent sponsor prospectus and direct CHIME conversations — runs across three broad tiers:

• Entry sponsorship ($15,000-$25,000): Smaller branded presence, limited peer-roundtable access, lower-traffic floor placement. Typically reserved for first-time CHIME exhibitors and Foundation Firm prospects evaluating a full commitment.
• Mid-tier sponsorship ($25,000-$50,000): Larger floor footprint, product theater slot, sponsored peer roundtable or content track participation, higher-quality attendee data access.
• Premium sponsorship ($50,000-$80,000+): Named tracks, keynote-adjacent visibility, multi-touch on-site activations, executive dinners, and Foundation Firm partnership integration.

All-in cost for a credible 10x10 presence — including booth, freight, travel, and staffing for a four-person team — typically lands between $20,000 and $35,000. Vendors running named sponsorship plus an executive dinner program plus a product theater slot routinely clear $100,000 in total Fall Forum spend.

The most strategically important CHIME commitment is not the Fall Forum booth itself — it is the Foundation Firm partnership, a multi-year tier that bundles the Fall Forum with regional CHIME events, member research access, and structured CIO peer programming throughout the year. Foundation Firm pricing varies by category and is typically the right structure for vendors whose enterprise sales cycle runs longer than 12 months. For broader budget math across the conference calendar, our medical conference marketing ROI framework covers attribution, payback windows, and how to model spend against multi-year provider sales cycles.

Pre-Show Strategy for the CHIME Fall Forum 2026

CHIME is a relationship show, not a discovery show. CIOs do not walk into the Gaylord Rockies expo hall looking for new vendors to evaluate — they walk in with a short list of named targets they intend to meet. Vendors who do not appear on that pre-show list end up scanning badges in a half-empty booth on day three. Pre-show meeting booking is not optional.

Build a target CIO list by Labor Day (early September 2026). Start with every health system you have an active deal in, then layer in the top 100-150 system-level CIOs in your geography and target segment. Prioritize CIOs at health systems running the EHR, infrastructure, or cybersecurity refresh cycles your product addresses. Aim for a named list of 60-100 CIOs with the specific decisions each one is making in the next 12 months.

Run a four-touch outreach sequence starting eight weeks out. The cadence that consistently books CHIME meetings: a personalized executive email referencing a recent system initiative, a LinkedIn connection request from your CEO or Chief Customer Officer (not a sales rep), a value-led second email with a peer reference, and a final pre-show meeting confirmation. Our pre-conference email campaigns guide covers the subject-line patterns and pacing that work specifically with senior health IT executives. Outreach from individual contributor titles — BDR, AE, marketing associate — consistently underperforms at CHIME because the audience is allergic to it.

Leverage CHIME-adjacent channels. Health system CIOs read a small, well-defined ecosystem of newsletters, podcasts, and member research — Becker's Hospital Review, KLAS Research reports, HealthIT News, the CHIME-adjacent podcast circuit, and a handful of analyst firms. Pre-show advertising and content placement inside that ecosystem reaches the CHIME audience at a fraction of the cost of general health IT media, with much higher credibility. EHR integration content and category-specific KLAS report references in pre-show outreach disproportionately move meetings off the maybe list.

On-Site Tactics: Peer Roundtables, Product Theater, and Executive Dinners

The three highest-leverage on-site tactics at the CHIME Fall Forum 2026, in order of pipeline impact:

1. Sponsored peer roundtables. CHIME runs peer-led roundtables across the agenda — small-group discussions with 8-15 CIOs anchored on a specific topic. A well-designed sponsored roundtable, facilitated by a respected CIO peer rather than your sales lead, is the single most effective business development activity at the Fall Forum.
2. Product theater sessions. CHIME's product theater is genuinely well-attended because the audience is uniformly senior. A 30-minute product theater session with a credible customer reference (ideally a CIO speaking on stage with your team) consistently fills your post-show pipeline with high-quality conversations.
3. Executive dinners and private receptions. The intimate Gaylord Rockies campus makes private dinners logistically simple. A focused dinner with 12-18 CIOs from your target list, programmed around a specific topic (board-level cybersecurity reporting, AI governance, payer-provider interoperability), produces more pipeline than a week of booth conversations.

What does not work at CHIME: generic booth giveaways, large island booths designed for HIMSS-style traffic flow, junior staffing, and consumer-grade marketing copy. The audience is small enough that bad on-site execution gets noticed by the CIOs you most want to impress. Booth staffing should be heavily weighted to senior executives — CRO, CCO, CIO-customer-advisory members, and category leads — rather than territory sales reps. Our medical conference booth design playbook covers the layout and signage hierarchy that reads correctly to a C-level audience.

Post-CHIME Follow-Up and the Q4-to-Q1 Health System Buying Window

The CHIME Fall Forum 2026 lands in mid-November, which puts post-show follow-up inside the Q4-to-Q1 health system buying window — the period when capital plans are finalized, fiscal-year-end software renewals close, and Q1 enterprise IT projects get committed. Post-CHIME follow-up that respects that timing produces materially better Q1 pipeline than generic post-show drip.

The post-CHIME mistake to avoid is treating every CIO conversation as a single follow-up timeline. A CIO who told your team in Denver they want to evaluate your platform in Q1 needs daily-cadence outreach in the first two weeks and a structured proof-of-concept conversation booked within 30 days. A CIO whose system is mid-cycle on a competing platform needs a 9-12 month nurture aligned to their renewal window. A CIO who is still pre-decision on the category needs an education-led cadence that ladders into a Q2 or Q3 evaluation conversation. Our hospital budget cycle marketing guide covers the specific timing and gating decisions that matter for enterprise IT sales into US health systems.

Build a Foundation Firm decision into your post-show review. If CHIME produced meaningful pipeline at the Fall Forum 2026, the right next move is almost always a multi-year Foundation Firm commitment rather than a one-off Fall Forum 2027 booth — because the year-round CHIME programming compounds the relationships you started at Gaylord Rockies in a way that an annual booth alone cannot.

Should You Exhibit at the CHIME Fall Forum 2026?

Yes, if you sell enterprise health IT into the CIO's office: EHR optimization and integration, cybersecurity and identity, clinical AI and ambient documentation, interoperability and FHIR, data analytics and population health, cloud infrastructure, telehealth and virtual care platforms, revenue cycle technology, RPA, or IT managed services. The CHIME Fall Forum 2026 is the highest-density CIO room of the year and the most efficient single venue for enterprise health IT pipeline development.

No, if your product targets physicians, nurses, value analysis committees, hospital marketing, payers, consumers, or anyone other than the CIO's office. The CHIME audience does not include those personas, and your spend will underperform compared with a clinical society meeting, HIMSS, or a payer-side venue. For broader system-wide hospital marketing strategy, see our hospital marketing strategies overview; for clinically driven device decisions, our value analysis marketing guide is the better starting point.

For vendors who genuinely sell to the CIO, the right 2026 play is a focused Fall Forum presence in November, paired with a pre-show outreach program starting in early September and a Foundation Firm conversation queued for Q1 2027. Treat CHIME as the anchor of a year-round health system IT marketing program — not a one-time November event — and the math consistently clears for enterprise health IT vendors with a credible US health system customer base.