Happy New Year

HIMSS is like New Year’s for me. It’s the culmination of a year or more of work at IHE, HL7 and HITSP, and the start of many new things afterwards. I’ve had several interesting conversations this week at HIMSS, and between spending all of my time on the show floor, talking to customers, talking to other vendors, and talking to government officials, I’ve had precious little time to write.

 

The Interoperability showcase is going extremely well. We have about an acre of space on the show floor, larger than any other booth on the floor. This is an incredible accomplishment. The IHE Showcase covered less than 2500 square feet five years ago. This year it is more than 10 times that size, and for good reasons (see There’s reason for that).

 

Today, I’ll simply tell you the kinds of things that I have learned so far. Later this week and next I tell you a lot more about what I learned:

• There is an underserved population of healthcare providers who need access to clinical information.
• There are some things I can do differently in my blog that I found out at the Meet the Blogger’s session in the Social Media center. I’ll be putting some of those into action here later this week.
• I heard more about what could replace HITSP in the future. I expect that it will be much differently organized, and will have more focus on the NHIN work. I also learned that I couldn’t read the recent tender for harmonization because I’m not employed by one of the contractors who can respond to it. I find that extremely frustrating on several levels.
• You can successfully put together a policy framework and supporting technology across several dozen public and private agencies in a short period of time.
• The new Certification proposed rule (that I won’t even read until some time next week) is now available. I have a lot more faith in this proposed regulation than I do in others simply because I trust science more than I do art. I’m sure that I will still have feedback on it, but the results I’ve already heard thus far indicate that this one will be a breath of fresh air compared to the prior two. Thank you NIST.
• There are at least 10 different health exchanges using IHE profiles that aren’t yet on the map but soon will be.

Happy New Year