For four days in late October, representatives of non-profit retirement communities across the country assembled in Philadelphia for the LeadingAge annual national convention. I was able to attend the convention, and it was an important learning event for me. I will be sharing some of what I learned in this blog post and subsequent ones. Today, I just want to give you a sense of the event.

I commuted each day via Septa trains from the Wawa station, which worked very well but made for a long day.

It was a huge event — probably at the limit of what the Philadelphia Convention Center can handle. About 6,000 people attended the conference, mostly staffers and administrators at retirement communities. There were very few actual residents of retirement communities. I only encountered four or five. Without exception, they were residents who had been recruited to participate in a presentation in which they described their experience with the program or product that was the actual focus of the presentation. I suppose I might have been the only resident who attended out of pure curiosity.

The sessions. There were over 160 educational sessions on all sorts of topics, many of them of interest to me. Looking at the list, I was like a kid in a candy store—but like that kid, I quickly saw that I’d have to pick favorites. In many cases, there were a dozen different sessions in the same time slot, competing for attention.

I decided to focus on a few themes. An obvious one was artificial intelligence (AI). There were lots of sessions that involved AI. (AI was also a big theme among the vendors in the exhibit hall.) In addition, I looked for sessions related to sustainability and the environment. But this was not the right convention for that topic. There was really only one session in the category. It dealt with reducing fossil fuel use at Horizon House, a Seattle retirement community. I also looked for sessions about organizational culture and the role of residents. I found I couldn’t attend many sessions beyond those three topics. And even with that restriction, I missed many of the AI sessions. There were at least 10 of them, plus a keynote presentation.

What were the other session topics? Some of the most common ones were nursing-related issues, management and financial topics, staffing issues, and marketing. I didn’t attend any sessions dealing with those topics.

The exhibit hall. There were nearly 500 exhibitors at the LeadingAge convention. I wasn’t really prepared for the size of the exhibit hall, nor for the nature of the exhibitors. I knew there would be the traditional providers of goods and services for retirement communities: vendors of hospital beds, financial services, food service suppliers, construction companies, and the rest. They were certainly there, and they had the biggest booths. But there were hundreds of small booths, mostly 10’ X 10’, many of which offered software or technology of some kind.

Overall, the traditional suppliers clearly occupied the most space, but technology providers seemed to occupy by far the most booths. That was unexpected.

The large number of exhibitors presented the same issue as the sessions: there were far more interesting-sounding products and services to see than I could possibly manage. Again, I had to focus. I chose to look mainly at AI and robotics as well as fall-prevention technology. But many other products caught my eye and I expect to write about some of them as well.

My overall experience at the LeadingAge convention was very positive. It was well organized and well attended and I met lots of interesting people. I may not get another chance to attend one of the national events, since they move from city to city (next year it is in Minneapolis). But I’m glad I went, and I would encourage other residents to go if they get the opportunity.