Medtech · McCormick Place, Chicago, IL · Nov 6-9, 2026

AHA Scientific Sessions 2026lead capture

The honest read on AHA Scientific Sessions 2026: what the organizer scanner really costs, what the badge encodes, and whether the venue WiFi holds up. Tendro is a lead capture app: your booth team scans badges and business cards with their phones, and it is $499 flat for the whole team at one event. One $499 fee covers every phone on your booth staff, instead of renting scanners per device.

Start free trial See the cost breakdown

Test the free desk trial: point a phone at last year's badges and a stack of business cards and judge the enrichment yourself. No credit card.

AHA Scientific Sessions 2026 fact sheet

Organizer scanner rental

$400 to $685

per device or package, 2025 XPress Leads order form

Free WiFi, not in booths

768 Kbps

McCormick Place: meeting rooms, public space and hall hotspots only

Show days · order clock

Nov 6-9, 2026

McCormick Place, Chicago, IL. Last edition's rates stepped up by order date.

Tendro (our line in this table)

$499 flat

whole booth team, one event, any badge from their phones

The basics

AHA Scientific Sessions 2026 at a glance

Cardiology and medtech buyers move through in waves between sessions, so capture speed matters.

Show dates	November 6-9, 2026 (exhibits Nov 7-9)
Venue	McCormick Place, Chicago, IL
Lead retrieval	Lead retrieval by XPress Leads (CDS / Maritz).
Who exhibits	Medtech

The scanner cost

What does lead retrieval cost at AHA Scientific Sessions 2026?

The 2025 XPress Leads order form ran $400 to $685 per device or package. The next edition's form typically drops with the exhibitor service kit.

Those are the 2025 numbers, so read them as the shape, not today's quote. The next edition's form typically arrives with the exhibitor service kit and the tiers tend to move a little.

Device (2025 form)	Advance	Standard	Onsite
App on your own device	$400	$455	$525
Handheld rental	$525	$605	$685

The price steps up as the show nears: advance, then standard, then onsite. The 2025 calendar cutoffs do not carry over, so treat the current service kit as the only source for real deadline dates. Note the per-device line: every extra scanner is another rental.

The 2025 lead-retrieval form is public. The 2026 form is listed as available soon on exhibitatsessions.org. Source.

The badge

What does the AHA Scientific Sessions 2026 badge actually encode?

The AHA badge is a CDS Smart ID: a printed code that only maps to contact data inside the XPress Leads exhibitor portal.

Tendro captures the lead by reading the printed face and enriching the rest. The encoded ID is a license plate: it means nothing without the CDS database behind it, so only the organizer's own scanner resolves it.

What Tendro reads is the printed face, the name, title, and company, and enrichment fills the verified email and firmographics the badge leaves off. Same for business cards and QR codes. No universal app, Tendro included, decodes the organizer's encoded badge ID.

So the honest limit carries its own fix: without the organizer's licensed access (the rented scanner or a paid event API) no app resolves the encoded ID, and OCR plus enrichment returns the named, verified contact without waiting on the rental. The universal badge scanner explainer walks through how.

One more thing worth checking: exhibitor contracts vary on third-party capture policies, so read yours before the show.

The WiFi

Does the WiFi hold up at McCormick Place?

McCormick Place's own exhibitor WiFi guidance limits complimentary 768 Kbps WiFi to meeting rooms, public spaces and a few hall hotspots; booths need a paid line.

McCormick Place offers complimentary WiFi at 768 Kbps in meeting rooms and public spaces, plus the permanent food-pod areas and one hotspot per exhibit hall, and says access can be sporadic. It is not booth coverage, and an organizer WiFi buyout can change the terms, so booths that need a connection order paid service. Its wireless internet page has the details.

It gets worse under load. Show-floor WiFi is half-duplex, and per Cisco's high-density WiFi design guidance, a single access point degrades past roughly 25 clients per radio. The busiest hour on the floor is the hour the signal is thinnest.

Tendro captures to the phone first. Every scan queues locally with its real timestamp and syncs in order when the connection returns, so a soft WiFi bar never costs you a lead. The offline capture write-up covers how the queue behaves when the venue drops.

The alternative

What is the $499-per-event alternative?

Tendro is $499 per event with unlimited team members, never per device. A five-person booth pays one flat fee, not five rentals.

AHA is one of the shows here whose vendor order form is public, so this page shows XPress Leads' actual 2025 rates, $400 to $685 by device and how early you order, rather than a cross-show band. IMTS, PACK EXPO and RSNA keep the sheet behind an exhibitor login; PRI and FABTECH publish current-year forms.

One fee, not per device.$499 covers the whole booth. Unlimited devices, unlimited scans. A five-person team is one rental, not five.

Volume discounts from 10+ events.Running the year? From 10+ events a flat per-event rate drops as you add events.

Any CRM with a public API.Salesforce, HubSpot, or any CRM with a public API. Sync starts with your first paid event, under 10 seconds scan to record.

Start free trial The hidden cost of organizer scanners

The desk trial

How do you test it before AHA Scientific Sessions 2026?

Run the free desk test before AHA Scientific Sessions 2026: scan old badges and business cards, judge the enrichment, then decide.

The free trial is the scan-and-enrichment desk test. Point a phone at last year's badges and a stack of business cards, watch what Tendro reads and enriches, and grade the data before AHA Scientific Sessions 2026 opens.

We do not publish a blanket enrichment match rate. Industrial badges enrich differently than SaaS ones, which is exactly why the desk test exists: run it on your own badge stack.

The free trial covers capture and enrichment; CRM sync switches on with your first paid event, so you test field mapping against a real show, not a sandbox. The desk test costs a lunch break and answers the enrichment question before any show is on the line.

Straight answers