Erika S. Fishman, Director of Research
Hello and welcome to the Manhattan Research eHealth Trends podcast on HIMSS 2009.
This year’s Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society or HIMSS annual conference was held in Chicago, Illinois. Approximately 27,500 health IT gurus flocked to the Windy City in anticipation of sharing ideas on the current state of health IT and where to go from here. The conference was purposely pushed back from the normal February date so travelers would not run into weather problems – but alas a snowstorm landed on the city during the conference.
The theme of this year’s conference, “Architects of Change”, cleverly played off the location of the conference and the call from our new President. The overall message was that we need change not in terms of digitalizing health care, but also with regard to change to how our health system works.
The HIMSS conference featured more than 900 IT companies on the exhibit floor from well-known to start-up ventures. There were some amazing booths, perhaps most notable a booth set up by software solution company OnBase which featured a full service bar and nightly happy hours. The other standout was a 60’s diner booth from HSN software company, complete with jukebox and dressed-up sales team.
New to the exhibit floor this year were the Product Pavilion sessions where companies had the ability to demo their programs and software for interested users. Other exhibit floor offerings included the Interoperability Showcase where companies present how their technology integrates into a common health framework.
There were more than 300 education sessions on topics including clinical decision support, electronic health records, emerging technologies, enterprise information systems, interoperability and health information exchange, IT infrastructure, leadership and strategic planning, and privacy and security, to name a few. Eleven of the education sessions addressed the $19B provided for health IT through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Emphasis was placed on the notion that healthcare reform and health IT cannot be exclusive.
Keynote speakers were big this year, with Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan discussing healthcare cost as well as privacy and security, and CEO of Kaiser Permanente, George Halvorson discussing how our system has misaligned incentives. But perhaps the speaker with the most buzz this year was actor Dennis Quaid discussing how his twins nearly died in the hospital from Heparin overdose due to confusing bottle labeling. Due to his experience, Quaid founded The Quaid Foundation for Patient Safety in hopes of increasing health IT adoption to minimize damage done by inevitable human error. Quaid definitely left a needed human touch to the conference and was a highly engaging speaker.
HIMSS attendees will be happy to know that next years conference will take place in warmer weather – in Atlanta March 1-4.
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