AHIMA helps members with Vcall Webinars

The Client: The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) represents more than 50,000 specially educated health information management professionals who work throughout the healthcare industry. These professionals serve the industry and the public by managing, analyzing and utilizing data vital for patient care and also make that data available to healthcare providers when it is needed most.

The Challenge: AHIMA began using Web conferences in the late 1990s as a way to minimize the cost and burden of half-day conferences. But its vendor raised prices and wanted to take control of AHIMA's registration functions for seminars, which would have severely limited the organization's ability to conduct follow-up marketing or communicate with registrants. AHIMA also needed to expedite the process to produce a master tape of each conference, reproduce that tape and fulfill orders. And AHIMA wanted to help more of its members by offering continuing education on hot topics in the industry.

The Solution: AHIMA sought out Vcall Web Conferencing for its one-stop suite of services.

The Results: Since it began working with Vcall Web Conferencing five years ago AHIMA has increased the number of web conferences from 20 per year to nearly 50. Where registrations per seminar were limited to only 300 in the past, AHIMA was able to double registrations, in many cases, using Vcall Web Conferencing. This enabled total registrations for live and archived seminars to jump from 3,600 in 2000 to almost 10,000 in 2004. Nearly 5,000 registrants took part in AHIMA's Web conferences in the first three months of 2005 alone!

Vcall Web Conferencing has allowed AHIMA to retain its registration methods to further promote other events, and it decreased the turnaround time to make seminars available on CD from five to six weeks to 10 to 15 days.

"I attribute a lot of the jump to the fact that people aren't traveling as much, and they can get a lot more out of the 90-minute programs. We're getting more positive feedback now, and people have grown accustomed to this kind of communication."

Roberta Aeillo
AHIMA - American Health Information Management Association