As the Connected Health Conference — formerly known as the mHealth Summit — gets underway Monday morning in National Harbor, Maryland, the organization that puts it on, the Personal Connected Health Alliance, is taking part in a merger of sorts. (“Of sorts” because it’s technically a combination of operations of two nonprofits rather than a traditional merger.)

The Washington, D.C.-based PCHAlliance is combining operations with the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance, the two groups announced before the start of the conference. WLSA Cofounder and CEO Robert McCray, already a PCHAlliance board member, has been named senior advisor on thought leadership of that organization.

“WLSA is out of the business of doing conferences, and the name will go away,” McCray told MedCity News Monday morning. He had announced at the 2015 WLSA Convergence Summit that that would be the last such conference.

Instead, elements of the WLSA Convergence Summit program — geared toward healthcare technology and life sciences companies — will move under the Connected Health Conference umbrella.

The Connected Health Conference itself had continued to evolve even before the combination with San Diego-based WLSA. What started out as the mHealth Summit under the auspices of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health became an event produced by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in 2014.

Last year, HIMSS added sub-conferences in population health and security, but dropped those this year. “A lot of participants found it too fragmented,” reported Patricia Mechael, HIMSS executive vice president for the PCHAlliance.

For 2016, the Connected Health Conference has reduced the size of the exhibit floor from past years. “We made it more of an experience than a trade show,” Mechael said, in part because the vendors wanted it that way. “They didn’t see this as a sales opportunity.”

According to the two groups, PCHAlliance has adopted WLSA’s membership model, meaning that the former will welcome life sciences companies. PCHAlliance membership had largely been made up of medical device manufacturers, courtesy of the Continua Health Alliance.

“This brings in the best of medical devices, and now is opening to startups, not-for-profits and academics,” Mechael said.

“This is clarifying the market,” added McCray. “The mission of the PCHAlliance has almost a direct ride-over with WLSA’s mission.”

Continua, the mHealth Summit and HIMSS created the alliance in 2014 as a nonprofit that seeks to engage consumers worldwide with digital health tools. It operates as an independent organization within HIMSS.

Two months ago, the Connected Health Symposium, put on each fall by Partners HeathCare in Boston, merged with the PCHAlliance. That brought point-of-care research into the mix, while WLSA adds foundational scientific research.

“We now have all these things under one roof,” McCray said.

Photo: Flickr user Matthew Rutledge