HIMSS11

This post is just a short review of my week at HIMSS11.

Friday:  Fly out, finished reading Information Retrieval: A Health and Biomedical Perspective, get to hotel, don't bother to go to Interoperability Showcase Booth because there's nothing for me to do until there's power and a network.  Write a review of the book.

Saturday:  I headed over at the booth around 8:00.  It's still a NOTwork, instead of a Network, but most people are here. Start handing out fun ribbons, and decided that I'm going to be a rock star this week.  After about four hours, I install the latest version of the software in 15 minutes, and I'm done.  I hang out for another 4 hours before heading back to the hotel.  Off to the EHRA Meeting and Dinner, where I and others recieve recognition from the EHRA.  Listened to Doug Fridsma talk about the S&I Framework.  Wrote a post on the Year in Review for Doug.

Sunday:  It's off to the Interoperability Workshop where I'm giving the shpeil on IHE Building blocks for interoperability.  Head back over to the showcase to see how things are going.  It's all going well.  Catch up with Joyce Sensmeir and Robin Raiford and we try to make plans for a photo shoot on the bike I'm going to rent this week. Then it's over to the GE Booth briefly and back to the showcase.  Around 5, I head to the opening reception briefly, where I run into about 3 people who've read the blog, and a number of recovering HITSP-ites.  Head off to the GE Kickoff dinner.  Got the question on "What is a tweetup?" correct.  Then it's back to the HIMSS reception to pick up the Sushi crowd for dinner at Seito Sushi.  Excellent meal, great prices, great saki list, and fresh wasabi, at least 4 out of 5 on our ranking table.

Monday:  Opening day.  Meet up for breakfast with the CDS Consortium.  Have an EHRA meeting, and then off to Eagle Rider to pick up my transport for the next two days. Use my tweetup question award to get some cheap eye protection.  Back at the Interoperability Showcase booth by 10:30.  Meetup with Ceasar Torres (@HIMSS on Twitter), who finds out I have a bike for a couple of days.  He comes up with the idea of rolling it into the Social Media Center.  Catch up with Arien Malec and we make plans to meet up later on S&I Framework stuff.  Say hello to Doug again.  Lose Joyce and Robin, so no photo shoot today.  Tomorrow is about recognition, so I write a post on what David Tao has done in the Interoperability space.

Tuesday: A crazy day, packed with stuff.  The day starts off with me learning that Ceasar made it happen via a tweet by Brian Ahier, and better yet, he's made the link to the missed photo op with Joyce on the bike.   Then I'm off with an EHRA meeting with Arien Malec, in which we come out with some good ideas.  In general, the whole notion of Direct is about simple messaging for simple uses as part of the glide path to EHR and HIE where you can do more complex things.   Back to the showcase, where I finish lining up details with Ceasar.  Dr. Blumenthal is at the Showcase, so it's a pretty packed place.  I head over to find Sandy (who runs the showcase for HIMSS) and as I walk up, Farzad Mostashari reaches out to shake my hand and shouts "Motorcycle guy!" OK, I know he's listening at least.  I shake hands with Dr. Blumenthal also and they head out.  At 1:30 we roll the bike in, and quickly take shots of Joyce and Robin on it.  The tweetup goes quite well.  I catch up with Wes Rishel and we talk about greenCDA for about 10 minutes before he has to run off to another meeting.  Then it's back over to the Social Media Center where I give a presentation on metrics and blogging.  You can find more detailed information from that presentation here.  Then it was off to Universal's Islands of Adventure for the GE Tweetup.  We did the Spiderman ride and the Incredible Hulk.  Some people even went back for a second run on the Hulk, which after a day of having only Mountain Dew for lunch and coffee for breakfast was too much for me.

Wednesday:  Whoever thought it was a good idea to pack my calendar with back-to-back-to-back meetings at Hall E, Hall A, Hall E, Hall C, Hall A and back to Hall E needs to be instructed on how long it takes to walk a mile.  At least GE fed me breakfast this morning before I dropped the bike back off at the rental center and headed back to the showcase for the Standards Geeks tweetup.  Quite a bit going on today.  Arien and I talk about some of his concerns on XCA and XCPD.  The day ended with an EHRA meeting with the ONC-ATCB's and Carol Bean from ONC (She's certifiably cool).  Not much to be said about the permanent certification program, but some good dialog on the ATCB program and as much as we know about stage 2.  NIST is no longer the only one writing test procedures (Mitre is apparently working on Quality and there are others).  ONC published what is needed to create test procedures in the Federal Register, so now I have to hunt down that document.  I mention that we need some consistent labeling for the ONC-ATCB program so that physicians know what to look for (a message also conveyed to Doug at the EHRA dinner), and Carol acknowledges the miss.  They'll be looking into that issue.  I also point out to the ATCB's that they need to be engaged in the S&I Framework process, just like everyone else.  QA does after all, need to sign off on specifications, right?  I raise that same point later to some folks at Delloite who are coordinating the S&I framework activities.  Then it's off to another tweetup with @dirkstanley @unclenate @2healthguru @MatthewBrowning @jeffbrandt.  I write this piece for Arien to address some of his concerns.

Thursday:  I am so ready to go home.  I get a few minute breather to post photos, and took some time to catch up with what's going on in Direct, Exchange and Connect portions of the ONC presence in the showcase.  I did a short interview with the HIMSS media folks on the showcase that may or may not get used (I need to work on that issue), then off to the airport.  What should have been an uneventful trip home gets challenging.  First, one of the multiply redundant components used for navagation goes down and we have to land at BWI to change planes.  Fortunately, a replacement plane is ready for us, and we just get off, line up, and start getting back on in just a few minutes.  Then, after I land in Boston and get into the cab, to get home, someone T-bones it.  Fortunately we were all moving at 5mph, and all damage is cosmetic, but it's another delay.

Friday:  I think I'll take the rest of the day off.  I've spent the last 11 days straight working, and the last 7 away from home.  I need a brain break.

Putting the Lego Together

On Sunday I taught a workshop that used a lego theme to explain how IHE has the building blocks to create many different things.  Of course, the images rolled around in my head all week, and I realized what's really right about that analogy.  Anyone who is familiar with Lego Technic parts realizes that there are a limited number of different connector types, and that what really makes a design is NOT the connectors, but rather the shape of what the connectors are attached to.

The Chopper below illustrates the point.  You can find several pieces that have similar connectors on them, but if the shape of the peice where the connectors are was different, well, it just wouldn't be as cool a chopper as this one.

Red Technic Chopper Motorcycle by Mike Cummings

But all IHE tells you is the shape of the connectors, not the shapes of the pieces they are attached to.  That's what makes Lego (and IHE) so cool.  The shapes of the connecting components are standardized, but the rest of the piece can be custom made to fit.  Sometimes this makes it difficult to understand how to use an IHE profile, because it really is the shape if the pieces that inspires the use case and the profile, be it an EHR, HIE, RIS, PACS, Workstation, et cetera.

So what happens when we describe only the connectors is that sometimes the shape of the body to which they are attached is lost, or we don't understand how it works.  That's what happened today while I was talking to Arien Malec about his concerns about the scalability of the NwHIN Exchange using IHE's Cross Community Architecture. 

The XCA profile builds on the XDS query capabilities, and defines a transaction that looks almost exactly like an IHE XDS Stored Query transaction.  The only difference is that it has one additional requirement regarding the home community identifier that must be included in the metadata.  The whole point of this transaction is to support fan-out of an XDS query from a gateway to other  HIEs that might have information on a patient.

So, imagine that there's an HIE in Florida and one in Boston, and I'm the patient in Orlando.  I'm a visitor, and they need to get my records from Boston.  So, they query the gateway in Orlando, the gateway queries the HIE in Boston, and violla, they have my data.  So far, so good.  But the scalability problem that Arien is worried about has to do with the number of HIEs that query will need to fan out to in order to find me.  If they don't know to ask in Boston, and we have 100 or more regional HIEs, that query could go to every HIE in the nation, and only 1 out of 100 would return any data for me.  That's a LOT of wasted CPU bandwidth.

So, how does the XCA gateway in Orlando know who to ask?  Enter into the picture the Cross Community Patient Discovery profile.  This is to PIX/PDQ version as XCA is to XDS.  You can issue a query for patient demographics and get back a result listing the patient ids and their home comunity ids.  So, the XCA gateway issues an XCPD query, and it returns the home community ids where we know that patient has data.

This seems like a shell game, because we've just transferred the magic about figuring out who to fan out from XCA to XCPD, right?  Not really. 

One possible solution makes the HIE responsible for the patient's medical home responsible for keeping track of the care locations from which they recieved care, and make all care locations which treat the patient responsible for telling that HIE to associate the patient with their home community id.  This is one of the possible implementation mechanims that could be supported using by XCPD.  There are others, but I can't give away ALL the good stuff.

So, XCA without XCPD, potentially 100 queries to fan out to, of which most would be expected to fail.  XCPD has one query to perform, and then based on the results of that query, a query to each holder of records for that patient.

Blogging and Metrics and for Healthcare Social Media Enthusiasts

Healthcare Social Media is all the rage.  While I'm not a healthcare professional, I do have a few tips to offer those who are thinking about reaching out with Social Media and Blogging.  Earlier today I gave a short presentation to at the Social Media Center at HIMSS.  For those of you who missed it, here is a a partial repeat of what I covered, with extras that I just couldn't give in 30 minutes.

I gained a real appreciation for the use of metrics when the company that I worked for a decade ago decided that it was going to become ISO 9001 Certified, and also apply the Software Engineering Insitute's Capability Maturity Model.  So back when I started this blog, I immediately hooked it into Google Analytics.
Like all the tools I use, it is free.  Google can tell you quite a bit about what people are reading, and you can watch the trends and link them to events to give you some clues.  Here's a picture of the top part of the dashboard that shows page visit trends over time:

When I started this blog, I was writing a couple of times a month then quickly moved to around 2 times a week.  In June of 2009, about a year later, I hooked the blog up to twitter using http://twitterfeed.com/.  Everytime I posted, it now went to twitter.  Pretty quickly there was a small but noticable bump up in readership.  In July and more so in August of that year I made a concerted effort to post daily.  It was hard at first but I found ways to repurpose what I was doing for other things, which made it much easier. More content about doubled and then tripleed readership.

Do you see that sharp spike in the middle of the chart?  That was due to two posts, but mostly this one: Recognition. The Ad Hoc Harleys have since become some of my most popular posts, and that post broke single day and single week prior records by a clear margin.  It was helped by a viral e-mail push.  I hit as many e-mail lists as I could with that post, and in that time, that meant HL7, IHE and HITSP mailing lists.  I don't do that often, but for really important stuff I do.  At least 40 of Andrew's co-workers saw that post.

How do I know?  Google told me.  If I look at the stats on that particular post (View content by title), and then list by network Service Provider, I can often get a good deal of information about who is reading a particular post:

My own particular favorite sites that have hit my blog are these two:

I'm pretty sure I know what posts prompted these page views once I tracked down who works in this office, and the dates that they hit the blog.  If you click on the individual service provider, it shows a graph of when the hits occur:

That was two days after I wrote my first review of the PCAST report.

My next most favorite image from Google Analytics is this one:

When you click on the Map Overlay button in the Overview report, you get a bigger map.  Any colored areas are those where you have readers.  My goal is to someday see this map filled in.

Many of the features of Google Analytics are also available in Blogger or Blogger In Draft, if you use that as your blogging platform.  In Wisconsin, I have one hit in one particular city that I know belongs to John Moehrke before he turned scripting off in his browser.  I know he reads me more often than that.

What Blogger does is a little bit different.  It tracks hits at the server, which provides more accurate page counts but is somewhat less featured in capabilities than Google Analytics.  In my particular space, I'm seeing about 50% more hits through Blogger than Google Analytics can track.  John gets different results because his readers are often more security concious.

There's one little tidbit extra for blogger users.  When Google tracks the titles of your page in Blogger, the root page of your blog is just given the title. So http://motorcycleguy.blogspot.com/ has the title "Healthcare Standards", but the page for a single post is "Healthcare Standards: Title of the Post".  But I believe that most people hitting the root of the blog are there for the first post.  So, I have a bit of script that changes the title of that page, which means that Google tracks the title of the blog differently depending upon which post was first up.

There's two pieces of script code you need to add to your page's HTML.  In blogger, you would go to Design | Edit HTML, and then click on the "Expand Widget Templates" checkbox.  After the body element, add the following to declare a variable that gets used later.

The first goes in after the body element.

<script type="text/javascript"> var titleRedone = 0; // My Title Fix </script>
The second comes right before the div using the post-header class.  It checks to see if the variable has already been changed, and if not, fixes up the title.  Just remember to change "Healthcare Standards:" to the name of your blog.
<script type='text/javascript'> if (titleRedone == 0) { document.title = "Healthcare Standards: <data:post.title/>"; titleRedone = 1; } </script> <div class='post-header'>
This will change the title that Google Analytics uses to report on your blog when you use the Content by Title View, but won't have any impact on how it reports the URL for the page the reader hit.  That's a handy way to distinguish how they got to the page.

There's a ton more you can do with Google Analytics.  Read the documentation and play around.

The best Search Engine Optimization tip that I've learned from it is that simple names for blogs and posts are the best.  This blog is called Healthcare Standards.  Guess what is in the top spot in Google for that query?  Look also at the Meaningful Use Standards Summary.  I learned this when I realized how well my post on Clinical Decision Support was doing over the course of a year.  Now I conciously think about titles.  Sometimes I'll forgo a clever title for an easy to find one.

One last free tool that I'll mention is Google Web Master Tools.  That tool gives you great information about links to your blog, searches (most people find me using "motorcycle guy blog" as the query), and page rank.

Keep on blogging

   -- Keith

Recognition

Now I know you are all expecting a report out on the Interoperability Showcase, and I promise one tomorrow, but today I have other things in mind.

Saturday night I attended the EHR Association annual dinner for the first time at HIMSS (usually I'm completely tied up at the Interoperability Showcase, but this year I wasn't).  This year the EHR Association recognized various of its members for some of their contributions to the association.  As Carl Dvorak, chair of the association put it, it seems a little bit like the high school club giving awards to its members.  I was pleased to be recognized with an award for interoperability along with several other association members for work in interoperability and other areas (more on that in a later post).

It got me to thinking a little bit about what it means to give an award, because of course, I do give one from time to time, and the requirements are pretty obscure for how I award it.  There's no set time line for how this award is given out, no nominations committee, and no unbaised judging.  I admit to it being completely arbitrary and of course, it only comes really with bragging rights and a pretty picture you can print out, unlike the EHRA awards which you can hang on your wall.

If you haven't already guessed it, it's time for another Ad Hoc Harley.  This particular award is going to someone who has been very quietly, but intelligently speaking on a number of interoperability projects going on around our industry.  Back in HITSP days, this person was my first choice for who to represent the Care Management and Health Records committee to the HITSP equivalent of the HL7 Architecture Review Board.  Recently, in the CDA Consolidation work, he's taken quite a bit of data from IHE, HL7 and HITSP specifications and shared it in a way that is remenicent of one of Robin's Eggs.  In a roomful of loud, forceful and often argumentative speakers, this particular person remains calm, cool and collected, and quietly pokes the holes that are needed into our best laid plans, just as quietly offers solutions.

His most recent works are a reflection on his harmonious and well thought out nature, which is a dead givaway if you've been paying attention.  For his efforts, I award the next Ad Hoc Harley to:

This certifies that 

David Tao of Siemens

Has hereby been recognized for outstanding contributions to the forwarding of Healthcare Standardization

Congratulations David, welcome to the blogsphere, and I hope to hear more from you in HL7, IHE and the S&I Framework initiatives.  We need more like you...

P.S.  This is the second time I've given the award to what some might consider a competitor.  If you walk down to the Interoperability Showcase to hall E, you'll find that unlike everywhere else this week, there are only collaborators in this venue.

A year in Review

Regular readers of this blog know that I organize my "standards" year around HIMSS and the IHE Interoperability Showcase.  The showcase is the culmination of a years efforts in IHE made real.
So, tonight is new year's eve as it were.  This evening I attended the EHRA annual meeting and dinner at HIMSS (my first time, though I've been a long time EHRA member).  ONC's Doug Fridsma was the keynote speaker, and he asked everyone at the meeting to e-mail him their updates on what significant has happened in standards this year.  As usual, I'm doing two things and using task to feed the blog monster as well.

There are a number of events that important to me personally this year:

1. I finished writing The CDA™ Book (yes, CDA and CCD are now HL7 trademarks, and will soon be registered).
2. I was elected to the HL7 Board
3. I got a year off from HITSP-like activities (while I was involved in the Direct Project, John Moehrke led those efforts for my employer).

Other events are also important to me personally, but also affect other members of my country.

1. The HITSP C32 was adopted as a standard for Meaningful Use, and includes work that I started on more than 5 years ago and advanced through three different organizations.
2. HL7 Version 2.3.1 and Version 2.5.1 were also adoped for laboratory reporting and immunizations in the US.
3. The Direct Project took off like a rocket, and included IHE XDM and XDR profiles in it.
4. IHE USA was finally incorporated.
5. HL7 has taken on some interesting new work and thinking in simplifying its standards.
6. SNOMED CT and LOINC were also recognized in Meaningful Use regulation.

From an International Perspective:

1. HL7 CDA moved to the "Entering the Plateau of Productivity" according to Gartner.
2. IHE moved to the "Climbing the slope" according to Gartner.  The XDS map recieved over 100,000 hits in a year, showing the popularity of this profile, and interest in where it has been adopted (I'll bet you cannot point to any other resource that tracks any other HIE interoperability specification the way this map does).
3. HL7 and ISO finished a joint ballot on the ISO/HL7 Data types, a set of standard data types for healthcare.
4. CDA was adopted by ISO as an International Standard.
5. HL7 released important draft specifications on Decision Support Services, Terminology Services, and electronic Quality Measures.
6. IHE PCC created its first workflow profile: Perinatal Workflow.
7. IHE ITI updated document subscription, and added multipatient query and cross community patient discovery.

So, that's my year in review.  If you want to see the outcomes, have a look at the Interoperability Showcase at HIMSS11 this year.  Quite of bit of what I described above is being demonstrated there, and most of it is in production.  If you want details, you can probably find me around the help desk this week.

   -- Keith

P.S.  If you cannot find me, it might be that you aren't looking for me in a suit.  It does happen, usually around this time of year.  Jacob Reider kindly provides proof:

IHE Expands Educational Sessions at HIMSS11: Learn more about IHE- February 20-24, 2011

IHE Community,

IHE Expands Educational Sessions at HIMSS11 Annual Conference and Exhibition:

IHE will feature four new educational sessions at the HIMSS11 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Orlando, Florida this year- February 20-24, 2011. We invite you join us and learn more about IHE. Admission to all HIMSS11 Educational Events are free for registered conference attendees. View the full list ofEducational Sessions below.  

IHE Committee and Deployment Presentations at the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase^TM:

The HIMSS Interoperability Showcase is sponsored in partnership with IHE each year. As a result, IHE is featured throughout the Use Cases, tours, the HIMSS Live Exchange, and educational session in the Showcase Theaters. Visit the Showcase in Hall E, Exhibit Booth #7343 at HIMSS11 to learn about volunteer opportunities, the IHE domains, and deployment committees.

HIMSS11 Educational Sessions: 

·      Fitting the Puzzle Pieces Together to Achieve Interoperability: A Hands-on Interoperability Workshop * | Date: Sun. February 20 at 8:30-12:30pm | Location: Room 203 A | Event: AC11WS-D
·    IHE- An Interop Process for Enable Utilization of Data across Domains | Date: Sun, February 20, 2011 at 3:15-4:15pm | Location: Room 303 C | Event: SUD7
·    Experiences Implementing IHE Profiles in the Real World | Date: Wed, February 23, 2011 at 9:45-10:45am | Location: Room 330 E | Event: 154
·    IHE Profiles Supporting Meaningful Use | Date: Wed, February 23, 2011 at 1:00-2:00pm | Location: Room 330 | Event: 173

IHE Domain Overview and Presentations: Gain a quick twenty minute domain overview and the work being developed today! All presentations are held in Hall E, Exhibit Booth #7347 in HIMSS Interoperability Showcase Theaters A or B. See listing below.

·    IT Infrastructure (ITI) Domain- Theater A | Date: Mon, February 21, 2011 at 5:00-5:30pm

·    Patient Care Devices (PCD) Domain- Theater B | Date: Tues, February 22, 2011 at 4:45-5:15pm

·    Patient Care Coordination (PCC) Domain- Theater A | Date: Tues, February 22, 2011 at 5:00-5:30pm

·    Radiology Domain- Theater B | Date: Wed, February 23, 2011 at 4:45-5:15pm

·    Quality, Research and Public Health (QRPH) Domain- Theater A | Date: Wed, February 23, 2011 at 5:00-5:30pm

     

Volunteer with IHE- Learn how to participate today! Learn how your organization can impact and shape the healthcare IT by volunteering in IHE committees. Attend one of the three domain meetings listed below. All meetings held in Room 305 A&B.

·    Patient Care Devices (PCD) | Date: Tues, February 22, 2011 at 10:30-11:30am

·    IT Infrastructure (ITI) | Date: Tues, February 22, 2011 at 12:00-1:00pm

·    Patient Care Coordination (PCC) | Date: Tues, February 22, 2011 at 1:30-2:00pm

IHE Global Deployment Committees Overview & Presentations: IHE has established over twenty Global Deployment Committees. Each committee is based in a given nation or region to promote the appropriate use of IHE Technical Frameworks within their respective areas. For example, IHE USA promotes the effective use of IHE’s work with the National Office of the Coordinator (ONC). All presentations below will be held in HIMSS Live Exchange Theater (Theater C) of the Interoperability Showcase.

·    IHE USA Deployment Committee | Date: Wed, February 23, at 12:15-12:45pm

·    IHE Europe Deployment Committee | Date: Tues, February 22, 2011 at 3:00-3:30pm

To learn more about IHE or the HIMSS11 Educational Session and presentations contact IHE@himss.org or visit our websites: IHE International, IHE USA or the HIMSS Conference website
.

*HIMSS Educational Workshops require an additional fee and pre-registration. Click here for more details.

 

IHE Events at HIMSS11 in Orlando

There are a number of IHE related interoperability events going on at HIMSS11 this year besides the Showcase.  This is a brief list of some of the more interesting ones:

Sunday, February 20, 8:45 AM - 9:45 AM

Clearing the Way Conceptually for Effective Secondary Use of Clinical Data

Sunday, February 20, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM
IHE: An Interoperability Process for Enabling the Utilization of Data Across Domains

Wednesday, February 23, 9:45 AM - 10:45 AM
Experiences Implementing IHE Profiles in the Real World

Wednesday, February 23, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
IHE Profiles Supporting Meaningful Use

I'll be one of the people facilitating this workshop...
Sunday, February 20, 8:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Fitting the Puzzle Pieces Together to Achieve Interoperability: A Hands-on Interoperability Workshop

And this, while not IHE related, is another event I'll be involved it.  It is a short presentation on how to use various tools to use metrics with your blog that I'll also be giving.

Tuesday, February 22, 5:00 PM - 5:30 PM

 Boosting Your Blog's Impact with Metrics and Analytics

I'm off to see the Wizard in Aus.

Actually, that about one of twenty different things I'll be up to over the next two weeks.  I won't list them all, but some include:

1. I'll be attending the HL7 Working Group meeting in Sydney Australia.
2. I'll be attending my first HL7 Board Meeting
3. I'll have my last HL7 Structured Documents meeting as Cochair (I'll just be a committee member after Monday).
4. I'll teaching classes on CCD, IHE XDS and CDA, and a workshop on how to develop an IHE profile
5. I'll be attending my 7th IHE Connectathon.
6. I'll be attending my first Connectathon Conference, where I will be presenting on development of IHE profiles.
7. I'll be preparing materials for two sessions I'll be teaching for a John's Hopkins Informatic's program.
8. I'll be reviewing meaningful use phase 2 proposals and related regulation as it arrives.
9. I'll be preparing two presentations I'll be giving later this year at HIMSS11, one on social media, and another on development of IHE profiles (can you see a theme here)?
10. I'll be promoting The CDA Book, now available for pre-order from my very own bookstore.

You can look forward to a week of blog posts from the HL7 Syndey WGM next week on what's new from HL7.  In the following week, expect a week's worth of posting on the IHE North American Connectathon.

I hope to see many of you in my (and your) travels in the coming weeks.

Oh, yeah, and the Wizard?  That's @omowizard.  I'm hoping we can cook up some interesting magic with respect to healthcare standards.

   Keith

P.S.  For those of you who've asked:  The manuscript is only available to educational institutions looking to review the book for use as a text in Informatics or Health IT classes.  Sorry, no early copies...  I'd love to get them to you sooner, but I just can't.

HIMSS11 Interoperability Showcase Registration - 8/16 - 10/8

This announcement crossed my desk this morning. The showcase routinely attracts (over the last 5 years), 8 - 12% of the HIMSS audience. Even when it is in another room, it's a huge draw. I'll be there, will you?

Keith

---

 

Dates: February 21 – 24, 2011
Registration Opens: August 16 – October 8, 2010

 

For more information about the Interoperability Showcase please contact the Showcase Team at InteroperabilityShowcase@himss.org or call +1-312-915-9213.

The opportunities and challenges for healthcare have never been greater. From the new administration in the U.S. to Ministries of Health in nations worldwide, one of the common solutions is the adoption and smart use of health information technologies.  But just having health IT solutions in a large hospital, a small one doctor ambulatory practice, or a region-wide health information exchange is not enough—technology cannot just be present – it must be integrated into the practice so that using technology is as natural and part of the routine as gathering a patient's vitals and family history.

Making it all work is not unlike putting together a puzzle. A critical piece of the puzzle is ensuring not only that the health IT systems used are standards-based but can seamlessly exchange and effectively utilize the healthcare data provided. This is IHE's role; to provide the framework in this puzzle by connecting or integrating all of the healthcare-based standards and build an inoperable healthcare system for the future. 
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is at center stage leading this important initiative. Learn more about IHE's role in standards-based integration and how you or your company can participate.

Demonstrate Leadership in Healthcare Integration:

Participate in HIMSS Interoperability Showcases

As new IHE profiles (About IHE) are released as a result of IHE's development work the next step is to demonstrate at a HIMSS Interoperability Showcase, the seamless transfer of standards-based health IT technologies across multiple vendor systems using real-time data. This unique and interactive display of interoperability allows end-users and vendors to gain a hands-on experience of how we can use HIT to improve patient care by harmonizing healthcare information exchanges. More importantly, IHE and the Interoperability Showcases bring together the industry's most fierce competitors and top IT experts to work at the same table and build technical frameworks and Integration Profiles for interoperable systems.