Day 1 of the 5th HIMSS Virtual Conference and Expo started out strong with attendees clamoring for healthcare IT information in the education sessions, exhibit hall and lounges. Participants were especially looking for more details on the federal stimulus funds.
Mushtari Afroz, IT research analyst for Info-Tech Research Group, said that she is following sessions on electronic medical record (EMR) and electronic health record (EHR) and healthcare IT stimulus implications.
"The sessions are useful and some presenters have talked about the HIT policies and recent development in the policies in a lot more detail than I expected," she said. "This is really useful to remain up to date in the topic."
First-timer Afroz found the conference setting "very easy to navigate" and required minimum literacy in navigation technologies. While she gave a thumbs up on the usefulness of the networking tools, she wanted an option that allowed her to see who was attending a specific education session. "If the tool were there, I would have known and networked with people who have interest in the similar fields," she said.
Don Sheppard, CEO of Sheppard Consulting Services, is a virtual conference veteran, having worked for 13 years at IBM, which had built similar systems as far back as the late 1990s and where corporate meetings were held in Second Life. "HIMSS has by far improved on all the earlier attempts, and with technology today the event was very well done," he said.
Sheppard is attending to learn more about information presentation in healthcare. "I have seen some very good sessions which talked about how innovative approaches such as voice and mobile devices are being used to make the acquisition and presentation of data more streamlined to allow more time for patients," he said.
While he rated the networking tools as "okay," he is not seeing much use of the v-card or as much "hallway" conversation in the lounges as would be the norm at in-person conferences.
Gretchen Griswold, vice president of Marketing for Anvita Health, liked the idea of the Economic Stimulus Lounge, but the lounge wasn't differentiated enough from the main networking lounge to drive traffic to it.
"ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) is a hot topic, of course, but not so much top of mind with this IT- and implementation-focused audience," she said. Griswold has heard that the many EMR and HIE/EMR-lite options are creating confusion among the provider community. "The need for interoperability with other data sources – whether the health plan, labs, pharmacies – is clear, as is the long-term ROI," she said.
Griswold attended the "E-Prescribing: Physician Acceptance is the Easy Part," an Economic Stimulus track session. "The session on e-Prescribing was much more on the how than the why and looked at a Topeka case study of a two-year-old implementation – in a provider organization that's had EMRs since 1997), she said.
In the Q&A, attendees focused their questions on staff training, transition from SureScripts functionality to include RxHub data, getting small pharmacies involved in areas where large retail pharmacies don't exist, ROI and getting patients up to date with e-prescribing benefits, she said. "Very nuts and bolts," she added.
