Upon my recent return from the Annual Research Meeting of AcademyHealth 2015 in Minneapolis, I felt a great sense of appreciation.

BioMed Central’s attendance of this prestigious gathering provided me with an opportunity to interact with a diverse group of researchers, students and experts in the field of health services research.

Most important of all, the conference was an invaluable chance to meet our authors and external collaborators to discuss our content and new developments in their areas of interest relating to public health, global health and health services research.

It’s very nice to meet the people behind BioMed Central

Minneapolis offered a modern, vibrant, Midwestern sense of adventure to the proceedings as the Planning Committee Chair Lynn Blewett from the University of Minnesota was keen to highlight in her welcoming remarks.

The Twin cities provided a picturesque backdrop to the event which certainly lived up to its billing as one of the premier forums for health services research. The program was comprised of an excellent variety of sessions set out to cater for the interests of an eclectic audience but at the same time focused on a number of key themes.

The themes of the conference spanned the entire breadth of health service research from the study of health care workforce, health information technology, measuring safety, quality and value to research translation, dissemination, implementation and impact.

Thank you to everybody who stopped by the BioMed Central stand in the exhibit hall throughout the event. My colleagues and I were extraordinarily grateful to those of you who shared your experiences, asked questions relating to our portfolio of journals (pictured right), discussed the potential for future collaboration and the suitability of their work for publication in our open access publications.

As one enthusiastic attendee kindly exclaimed “It’s very nice to meet the people behind BioMed Central”.  We were very pleased that we could be with you!

I am particularly grateful to Keynote Speaker Shankar Vedantam, Science Correspondent with National Public Radio for addressing the challenges of change in healthcare while simultaneously educating the attendees on what the goalkeeper should really do in a football/soccer (depending on your locale) penalty shootout (Kick direction, 32.2% right; 28.7% center; 39.2% left)(Bar-Eli et al.,2007).

We did our very best to raise the roof (pictured below) with our exciting content, new initiatives, perspectives on open access publishing and the peer review process.

 I particularly enjoyed discussing the recent affiliation of BMC Health Services Research with Health Systems Global and the publication of the new cross-journal article collection ‘The Many Meanings of ‘Quality’ in Healthcare’. You can read more about the collection in the editorial here.

Attendees were also very keen to discuss the BMC series ethos and our memberships.To revisit the conversation around the conference, search for the hashtag #ARM15 and for information on future and related events follow @AcademyHealth.

Based on our experience this year, we will certainly be nominating AcademyHealth’s Annual Research Meeting as a premier forum for health services research. We look forward to doing it all again next year.