Another HIMSS conference is in the books. Amidst the craziness that HIMSS can be, it is always a pleasure to spend time running into friends, collaborators, and former colleagues. There have been lots of great pieces written about 2018 HIMSS, including by Chrissy Farr and by Lisa Suennen. Here are some of my thoughts and takeaways:
1 – Where’s the Peds?
HIMSS pretty much has a little something for anybody. However, walking the exhibition hall and seeing vendor booths, attending sessions, and talking with colleagues, there was a noticeable under-representation of anything having to do with pediatric care. I’m guessing this has something to do with $$, but I would love to see more attention paid to the specific needs of children, parent caregivers, pediatric care, and children’s hospitals.
2 – Cash and Flash
HIMSS had its usual plethora of vendor swag giveaways, plush carpeted booths, sponsored parties and happy hours, steak dinners, and other signs of the amount of money flowing through the system. One couldn’t help but wonder, if the biggest challenge facing American healthcare is one of cost and value, how could we be spending this much money on HIMSS while telling each other we were there to save money?
Some great tweets on this subject:
3 – Interoperability’s Day Has Arrived
With many thanks to years and years of tireless work by Ken Mandl, Josh Mandel, Aneesh Chopra, Micky Tripathi, Graham Grieve, and so many others, there was a palpable sense that FHIR APIs are crossing from “early adopter” to “mainstream.” CMS announced “Blue Button 2.0,” an API containing four years of Medicare claims data for 53 million beneficiaries that allows individuals to allow third parties to receive that data via API. The VA announced its Lighthouse platform, which gives external developers access to data and tools from the VA in order to more easily build apps to serve the needs of veterans. This is happening.
4 – 2018 HIMSS Word Cloud
AI. Cloud. Interoperability. Security. Provider Burden. API. Connected. Engaged. Consumer. Coordinated…… and Blockchain
4b – My favorite 2018 HIMSS pitch
Started off with the company saying, “even though all our founders come from an AI-background, and all our competitors use AI, we do not use AI in our product.”
5 – From EHR Implementations to Pilots to Mainstream Digital Health
Lots of thought and effort is going into thinking about how to scale innovation and move digital health into the mainstream. How can we create the infrastructure, processes, and tools to try things out, iterate, and scale innovations to get beyond the pilot trap? You can still feel the tension as people try to move past the era of EHR implementations to actually using their EHRs as an underlying platform to achieve care delivery goals like patient engagement, population health, and precision medicine. How can we best use EHRs as a platform on top of which we can integrate novel apps, analytics, and decision support? To me, solving this at scale is the key question and challenge of the next several years.