Attendees at this year’s HIMSS Conference & Exhibition need to focus on the agility of information systems and the companies that sell them, said Dave Nesvisky, senior director for healthcare at NetApp, a hardware and cloud computing vendor.
“What healthcare organizations need is agility, so they need to focus on solutions that offer agility,” Nesvisky said. “There are a tremendous number of mergers and acquisitions happening, where health systems are buying clinics and practices, where payers and providers are aligning. It’s such a changing landscape that is so unpredictable. On any given day, the leadership in IT at a healthcare organization can get a phone call saying, ‘We will double in size next month and you need to be able to support that.’”
To that end, Nesvisky said there are three trends in NetApp’s neck of the health IT woods.
“Clearly cloud is making its presence felt – every organization either has, or is creating, its cloud strategy,” he said. “In addition to cloud, clients are very interested in simplifying their overall infrastructure. And the third trend is flash. Capacity and reliability are going up, so organizations are looking at flash to provide a lower-latency experience for users.”
Those trends bring opportunities, Nesvisky added, but executives must look at their infrastructure holistically and that includes thinking about their business and how any decisions they make will support and enhance their business or have the opposite impact and inhibit the organization's core mission.
“That means do the products and services they are looking at enable them to take advantage of cloud strategies, does what they are looking at offer seamless scalability, do the products support multiple different types of workloads that do not require excess complexity and cost?” he added.
HIMSS17 runs from Feb. 19-23, 2017 at the Orange County Convention Center.
This article is part of our ongoing coverage of HIMSS17. Visit Destination HIMSS17 for previews, reporting live from the show floor and after the conference.
