A Practical Guide to Exhibiting at DMEA
DMEA is the annual meeting point for the German digital health market — hospital information systems, electronic patient records, telemedicine, interoperability, medical informatics and, increasingly, applied AI in clinical settings. It runs as a trade fair and a conference at the same time, in German and English, and it is the show where German hospital IT decisions get compared in one room before they get tendered. The organiser is the bvitg, the German trade association for healthcare IT, founded in 1995 and representing the vendor side of that market.
The 2027 edition runs from Tuesday 13 to Thursday 15 April 2027, and it is the first to be held at Messe München. That single fact reshapes almost every practical decision on this page, so the guide below deals with it first rather than treating it as a footnote.
The Move to Munich, and What It Actually Changes
The event began life as conhIT and was renamed DMEA in 2019. It was held in Berlin every year from 2019 through 2026, and the April 2026 edition was the last one there. From 2027 it continues at Messe München, run by the bvitg in cooperation with Messe München GmbH. The organiser is explicit that this is a change of address rather than a change of event: same name, same cycle, same audience, same subject matter.
What genuinely changes is everything procedural. A different exhibition company means a different exhibitor shop, different technical services, different order deadlines, different build-up regulations and a different set of forms — for example, anything involving a vehicle on the stand goes through a preventive fire-safety application rather than whatever the Berlin equivalent was. It also means a different floor plan, and at the time of writing the 2027 hall allocation had not been published. Exhibitors renewing out of habit should treat 2027 as a first-time exhibit in operational terms, even if the badge on the wall is familiar.
Who Actually Walks the Floor
The visitor list is unusually senior and unusually specific, which is why the stand design brief for this show differs from a general technology fair. The organiser describes the audience as IT managers and decision-makers from clinics and hospitals, representatives of health insurance funds and funding bodies, staff from public health authorities and government agencies, researchers in medical informatics, and consultants and project managers running digitalisation programmes. These are people arriving with a project, a budget line and a shortlist.
On the exhibitor side the mix is hospital information system and practice software vendors, telemedicine and remote care providers, digital health application publishers, IT infrastructure and healthcare cybersecurity firms, interoperability consultancies working with FHIR and connectivity, electronic patient record and documentation specialists, AI diagnostics companies, and university and research groups. In 2025 that came to around 900 exhibitors from close to 30 countries and 20,500 trade visitors — a Berlin figure, and the last full-scale reference point available before the move.
Designing a Stand Around Software
The central design problem at DMEA is that your product cannot be looked at. Nobody walks past a stand and understands a hospital information system from the outside. What sells is a seated walkthrough on a screen, typically ten to twenty minutes, with one of your people driving and one or two visitors watching and interrupting. The stand's job is to produce as many of those as the floor traffic allows, and to make each one comfortable enough that the visitor stays to the end.
In practice that means counting backwards from demo capacity. Decide how many simultaneous walkthroughs you need, then allocate roughly two and a half to three square metres per seated bay including the visitor chairs, then add the meeting room, storage and counter, and only then look at the total. Stands designed the other way round — total area first, demo bays fitted in afterwards — end up with bays crammed against each other, which is where the acoustic problem starts. Screen height matters too: mounted for a seated eye line, not a standing one, and angled away from the hall's overhead lighting so the visitor is not reading through a reflection.
What the Organiser Bills and What We Bill
Two separate invoices, and it is worth being clear which is which. Messe München bills you for the floor itself, charged per square metre with the rate varying by stand type — a corner or island position costs more per square metre than an in-line one — plus a communication fee covering your listing in the print and online exhibitor media, and the AUMA fee levied across German trade fairs. Hall services on top of that: electricity, cleaning, parking permits, stand security if you want it, and any technical service ordered through the exhibitor shop, all with published order deadlines and surcharges for late orders. Co-exhibitors carry a separate registration fee, invoiced to you as the main exhibitor.
We bill for the stand: design, fabrication, graphics, freight, installation, dismantling and the organiser paperwork that goes with the structure. That is one figure, quoted before we start, and it does not move afterwards. What we do not do is order your hall services in your name and mark them up, which is why the ranges further up this page look like build prices rather than package prices.
Building in Frankfurt, Showing in Munich
Every stand we deliver to Munich is fabricated at our Frankfurt workshop, assembled there in full, photographed, then broken down and loaded. Frankfurt to the Munich exhibition grounds is a straightforward domestic run down the A3 and A9 — one driving day, no border, no customs, no carnet, and no freight forwarder taking a cut. For an exhibitor based outside Germany that is worth noting explicitly: your stand does not cross a frontier even if you do, so the paperwork risk that usually sits over an international exhibit simply is not there.
The crew travels the evening before build-up so that assembly begins when the hall opens rather than after a long drive, and the same people dismantle at the close. Because DMEA is annual, a reusable system frame pays for itself quickly here — the structure comes back to Frankfurt, gets stored, and returns the following April with new graphics and a revised layout rather than being rebuilt from nothing each year.
Because DMEA runs annually and the stand is mostly furniture and screens rather than bespoke joinery, a modular system frame is the sensible default for most exhibitors here — it is reconfigurable between years and cheap to store. Our modular exhibition stands are built for exactly that pattern. Larger vendors hosting delegations and press usually need the freedom of a bespoke structure instead.
