Orchard Symposiums:  A Recap of our First Orchard Software Symposium

Orchard’s First Symposium - Bringing the Orchard to you!

Orchard Software filled up the crates and brought a little of the Orchard to the Northwest coast.  On September 13, 2006, Orchard held its first symposium at the Doubletree Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in Portland, Oregon. The event, designed for current Orchard Harvest LIS users and prospective users alike, attracted 72 attendees.  Orchard’s ever-growing customer base makes this symposium format feasible, and we have plans in place to do this again in 2007 in other areas of the country. 

The day-long event started with breakfast, followed by a keynote address on the subject of system integration from Henry Oglesby, VP of Operations, and Curt Johnson, VP of Marketing and Sales.  After the keynote address, attendees were able to choose from one of three breakout sessions: An Introduction to Harvest LIS, presented by Nancy Stoker; What’s New in Harvest LIS version 7.0, presented by Thom Franklin; and IT Issues, presented by Henry Oglesby.

After the morning breakout, everyone gathered for a delightful lunch and an open forum “town hall” meeting with Orchard executives Robert Bush, President; Henry Oglesby; and Curt Johnson.  Questions from the audience covered a variety of topics ranging from training to EMR implementation to the future focus of the company.  Rob, Curt, and Henry, each took their turn at answering everyone’s questions.

Following lunch, there were two more breakout sessions, and again for each session, attendees had the opportunity to select one topic from a list of three.  For the first afternoon session, the options were:  Microbiology Module by Nancy Stoker, Data Mining and Report Writing in Harvest LIS by Ginger Wooster, and again (because of the high demand for this session) What’s New in Harvest LIS Version 7.0 by Thom Franklin.  For the final breakout, the topics were Anatomic Pathology Module by Nancy Stoker, Setting up Rules in Harvest LIS by Thom Franklin, and Improving Lab Outreach/Webstation by Carla Hearst.

Attendees found the sessions and the face-to-face interaction with other Harvest LIS users and Orchard employees very beneficial.  Just about everyone expressed their interest for Orchard to hold another symposium in the Northwest again soon. Due to the success of our first event, Orchard has already begun planning two more day-long symposiums in 2007. Tentatively, we are hoping to offer one in Baltimore during April or May, and another in Dallas in September. Visit our website again soon, because as soon as we have information for our 2007 symposiums, we will post the details on the Orchard Symposiums page.

We want to thank everyone who attended and supported our first symposium event.  We enjoyed meeting each of you and appreciate all the positive feedback you gave us.  To those of you near Baltimore and Dallas, we hope to see you at our symposiums in 2007!  If anyone has suggestions for topics to be covered in future symposiums, please email Kerry Foster at kfoster@orchardsoft.com.