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WASHINGTON – In case you missed it, this year's HIMSS conference and expo, held Feb. 20-24 in Orlando, Fla., drew a record-breaking 31,225 attendees. It boasted more than 400 education sessions and more than 1,000 exhibiting companies and organizations. If it had any drawbacks, it was that it was so big that attendees (me included) wished they could have been in more than one place at a time.
The topics that seemed to dominate the meeting were interoperability, meaningful use and accountable care organizations. This isn't surprising, as most industry experts and policymakers had predicted this would be the case. After all, it's only the beginning of five years or more of federal incentives for providers who adopt EHRs and use them in a meaningful way. If healthcare IT is the boat, then ACOs are the rudder.
I asked a few industry leaders to give me their take on this year's conference. David C. Kibbe, MD, senior adviser to the American Academy of Family Physicians, chairman of the ASTM International E31 Technical Committee on Healthcare Informatics and a principal at The Kibbe Group, said he was "pleased to see innovation around secure health information exchange, interoperabilty, patient engagement and clinical analytics."
He also said he was disappointed to see the excess money spent at HIMSS while Americans still lack basic healthcare insurance.
Vincent L. Frakes, federal policy director at the Center for Health Transformation in Washington, D.C., said this was his second year at the conference. "As usual, it was a great exposition of a lot of great solutions that exist out in the marketplace," he said. "The movement toward ACOs and shared savings models dovetails perfectly with EHRs and health IT in general."
David W. Roberts, vice president of government relations for HIMSS, said, "The overwhelming excitement and enthusiasm exhibited by the 31,000+ HIMSS11 attendees clearly demonstrated that the EHR transformation is real and under way."
"The diversity of attendees from so many fields, including provider, payer, life sciences, mobile, banking, and others, showed that the health IT industry is no longer a stovepipe unto itself," Roberts said. "The outstanding speakers from the federal and state governments helped add to the knowledge of our attendees on the necessary details needed to participate in this ongoing transformation."
John D. Halamka, MD, CIO of both Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, is always a familiar face at major health IT events. But this year he was unable to attend HIMSS11, due to a trip to Japan. He said, however, he plans to include a list of others' observations of the conference in his blog, "Life as a Healthcare CIO,” at geekdoctor.blogspot.com and on the Healthcare IT News site healthcareitnews.com/.
