Once again, you can go and check out many of the tweets I did during my various activities at HIMSS on my two twitter accounts: @techguy and @ehrandhit.

The day started with the Blumenthal keynote. I can’t say that he really said anything earth shattering. It was a bit interesting to hear an overview of his perspectives. However, my favorite part of his speech was his opening story about how he got involved in healthcare IT and the time when he was a doctor and his EMR saved him from making a major medical mistake. It was really smart of him to tell a story like this. He also had some really good one liners (see my twitter accounts) that indicate his goals. So, I guess the David Blumenthal HIMSS keynote wasn’t completely meaningless.

Then, the rest of the afternoon was fantastic since I was able to spend almost the entire rest of the day roaming the floor. I had a number of interviews with vendors on the floor, but it was nice to just be able to be on the floor and learning in the booths. I think that some people don’t like it, but I really like browsing through the mayhem. I love seeing the message people are trying to send. I won’t go into all the details of people I talked to, but will be posting about them over the next couple weeks. I did get a number of videos that I think people will really enjoy.

I will just quickly mention the coolest swag I got. One place was handing out candy bars. I love chocolate so that was a big deal. Practice Fusion was fantastic since they treated me like a rock star for some reason and they gave me a cool jersey shirt. Very nicely done. I also got a $25 amazon gift certificate from Nuance thanks to seeing a tweet to go to their booth. Twitter definitely pays off.

However, the best giveaway I got was the Econo-keys completely waterproof keyboards. Yes, that’s right. You can actually clean these keyboards. The best news about this free swag is that I got a few of these keyboards to give away to readers of this site. So, watch for the video of these keyboards and an opportunity to get your own washable, flexible keyboard. They’re super cool.

Ok, enough about the swag. Sorry if you don’t like these summary posts. I’ll plan on posting more substantive posts tomorrow. For now, I’m going to bed. 15 hour days wear you out.