HIMSS11 Thoughts – Day 2

Hopefully none of you were expecting Meaningful Use Mondays. We’re taking the week off thanks to HIMSS, but there will certainly be some meaningful use discussion in my day 2 experience at HIMSS11.

I must admit that my morning was a little disappointing. I’d wanted to see Reich speak, but it ended up being too early for me. So, I followed what he said on Twitter. I’m afraid to say that following it on Twitter might possibly have been better than being there. There’s something really cool about the Twitter back channel conversation at a conference.

I was excited to go to the session Dr. No: The Response to HITECH, but it was a dud for me. Maybe it means I’m just too involved with the HITECH act that she didn’t offer me much to chew on. Plus, the presentation was pretty dry and flat. Oh well, at least I could enjoy the interesting Twitter chatter about the social media session by Mayo Clinic. Makes sense that Twitter would go wild during a social media session.

Next I attended the HIT X.0 presentation with John Glaser and Aneesh Chopra. Aneesh brought the rock star energy like usual, but John Glaser was pretty terribly boring. It’s not a good sign when the most memorable part of their presentation was Aneesh calling him Johnny G. I also was glad that they had the Twitter comments on screen. Too bad they were too strict with the filter of it, but baby steps.

Lots of interesting content from my meeting with GE healthcare. I loved how organized and professional they were about it all. Plus, their government liaison made an interesting comment about how the time frame for delivering meaningful use stage 2 details (Summer 2012 I think) and when hospitals need to show meaningful use stage 2 (October 2012 I think) is too compressed.

I also got a chance to look at the GE Centricity Advance iPad app. They’re following the same iPad EMR strategy I suggested previously where you only implement a subset of the EMR functionality on the iPad and as native iPad app that maximizes the iPad interface. I see most EMR vendors doing the same.

I had a very interesting chat with Jonathan Bush from Athena Health. I was excited to meet with him since you never know what’s going to come out of his mouth. I took a video of him where I did a “Tell me something I don’t know” with the most common HIMSS buzzwords. Once I get home, I’ll upload the video and post it on the blog.

After that I met with Rohit Nayak, from MedPlus (Quest Diagnostic’s EMR company that offers the Care360 EMR). Another day I’ll do a post to talk more about the Care360 positioning and what makes them unique. It’s really fascinating to see how a lab company is attacking the EMR market. It’s pretty unique.

Care360 recently made an announcement about Care360’s participation with Microsoft HealthVault and the Direct Project. Aneesh actually made the prediction in the session mentioned earlier that by the end of 2012 80% of doctors will have a direct project address. Rohit agreed that it was possible and that Care360 would be playing a major part. He even said that Aneesh was considering a leaderboard for which company assigns the most direct project addresses. I’d be very interested to see that happen. It’s amazing how having your name on a leaderboard will motivate companies.

After this I met with a whole set of people from Henry Schein (which offers the MicroMD EMR). The dynamics of a large successful company with an EMR division (similar to Quest) I find really interesting. Plus, Henry Schein has had their Practice Management software for a long time (14,000 PMS users).

I was impressed by MicroMD’s approach to marketing their software. They acknowledged that it’s hard to be all things for every type of potential EMR user. So, they’re all about focusing on those specialties where their EHR fits well.

I was interested in how they were approaching meaningful use. Similar to how they’ve done ePrescribing tracking, they’re meaningful use certified EHR will be reporting back how many of their users are meeting the meaningful use requirements. I’m hopeful that once they start collecting this information in full, that they’ll share that information on here. They sounded open to the idea. It would be quite interesting to know which meaningful use measures doctors were generally finding hard to meet.

I already wrote about my time at the MTIA name change. Go and read it if you’re someone that transcription is dead.

Then, off to HIStalkapalooza. I was actually surprised that the event was pretty empty. Much nicer than last year where you basically couldn’t move. Plus, it was great to see the ESD people and see them get featured for their great set of shoes. They also loved the special ESD HIMSS top 10 shirt I was wearing. It was perfect for the event. Here’s what was on the shirt:

The Top 10 REAL Reasons I’m at HIMSS Orlando:
#10 Disney World totally beats Coke World.
#9 Orlando won’t have snow like Atlanta did last year.
#8 ESD’s plantable seed card which turned into a real dill plany for ccooking. The swag that keeps on giving!
#7 I’m secretly hoping Colbie Calliat will do an encore performance this year.
#6 I need to walk off those holiday cookies.
#5 I hope I get scanned by the RFID devices and magically transported to a tropical island.
#4 Booth Babes!
#3 Can you say parties?
#2 I’m just here for the food.
And the #1 reason….Anything for the EMRandHIPAA.com fan girls.
Enterprise Software Deployment – We Implement IT

I thought about going to a couple other events, but just opted to come back and write a few blog posts. Lots lots more planned tomorrow. Be sure to find me at HIMSS tomorrow so you can win a free HD TV.

EMRandHIPAA.com’s HIMSS11 coverage is sponsored by Practice Fusion, provider of the free, web-based Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system used by over 70,000 healthcare providers in the US.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

5 Comments

  • I usually love your blogs, but this one is too much about the personalities of the speakers as opposed to the content of what they have to say. Since I don’t know a lot of these people, I would prefer to hear what they talked about and your comments on that content, not their personalities.

  • No surprise about Reich’s presentation. You were smart to sleep in.

    Stock presentations for you are a dud because you are way in front of where most are on the HITECH act.

    Very illuminating comment by the GE government liaison re MU2 definition and deadline. Timing of enterprise MU2 ‘squeeze’ could cause a unravelling in the face of the 2012 general election. Hate to make too many investments to achieve performance in front that end up getting rolled back if milestones/standards bars get dropped for political reasons.

    With news of another prescription med error … HITECH ought to focus on that target which should be low hanging fruit.

    While I’m more partial to the Cactus League teams I think I’d find a way to take a swing through a couple of spring training camps.

  • Ian,
    Thanks for the feedback. Sadly, the content they provided wasn’t worth posting. Otherwise, I would have posted more of their content. I’ll consider what you’re saying for future posts.

  • I think they said I had 16 people take a photo. I’m so happy I won. It’s nice to have a bunch of social media friends.

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