A Capitalistic Pipeline for Healthcare Products
Some events and conferences in the healthcare profession feel more commercial than other. Although many conferences rooted in professional practice appropriately use vendors to introduce products and services and reduce cost to the attendees, other conferences and events are more exploitative of the nursing profession. Which means two things: First, industry has caught up with the fact that the profession of nursing has incredible influence and impact, which is great and I welcome it. Second, the one I find more disturbing, is industry has figured out how to leverage and capitalize $$$$$ on our brand better than we have as a collective.
An example is the recent HLTH USA conference, pushing itself as a nursing partner and presenting itself as a space for collaboration and innovation in healthcare, bringing together leaders from health, technology, and investment sectors. On the surface, it appears to be a hub for progress, a place where ideas meet opportunity to improve systems and outcomes. Yet, beneath the glossy Las Vegas lights, branding, and high-energy presentations lies a familiar reality: HLTH. is largely a capitalistic engine, designed to introduce more products into an already over-commercialized healthcare landscape. It functions less as a movement for meaningful change and more as a marketplace, where solutions are sold to systems desperate to appear modern, efficient, and data-driven.
The problem is not the pursuit of innovation itself, but the way HLTH and other multi million and billion dollar companies define it. Here, innovation is often equated with marketability rather than impact. The conference promotes tools, apps, devices, and platforms that promise to “revolutionize” healthcare, but few address the underlying issues that drive inefficiency and inequity, understaffing, burnout, fragmented care, and the erosion of trust between patients and providers, lack of resources to the most vulnerable populations, issues addressing SDOH, and to the reality is most individuals working these issues can't even afford to attend the event due to it's outrageous cost. Instead of dismantling the structures that perpetuate inequity, these products reinforce them by placing profit above purpose. The focus shifts from caring for people to managing consumers, from collaboration to commercialization.
Nurses, in this environment, are not treated as leaders of innovation but as instruments of validation. They are positioned as “extenders” of technology, those who make new systems operational, who humanize products for marketing campaigns, and who provide the clinical credibility corporations need to sell their next big idea. The rhetoric of “empowering nurses” is often used to conceal a transactional reality: nursing expertise is leveraged to strengthen business cases, not to reshape them. While their images and voices are featured on stages and promotional materials, the true decision-making power and financial benefit remain with corporate executives and investors.
This framing of nurses as extensions of technology rather than drivers of transformation undermines the very ethos of nursing practice. The nurse’s role has always been about connection, context, and critical judgment, elements that no algorithm or product can replicate. Yet, in settings like HLTH USA, that human expertise becomes a marketing asset rather than a foundation for systemic change. The profession’s insight is commodified, packaged, and sold back to healthcare systems that continue to undervalue the labor and leadership of those providing direct care.
Ultimately, HLTH USA exemplifies a deeper issue within healthcare: the privatization of innovation and the commodification of care. True progress will not come from adding more tools to an already fragmented system, but from reimagining the structures that define it. That means centering the voices of patients and nurses, investing in public health infrastructure, and redefining success in terms of outcomes and equity rather than market share. Until that happens, HLTH and similar ventures will continue to disguise capitalism as innovation, selling the illusion of transformation while reinforcing the same inequitable systems they claim to disrupt.
