As most of you know, I’m deep in the weeds of planning for the HIMSS 2016 Annual conference. Actually, at this point on the Friday before HIMSS, I’m more or less planned. Now I’m just sitting here and wondering what things I might have missed. With that said, I’ve been preparing for this live video interview with the Samsung CMO which starts in 30 minutes (it’s recorded in case you miss the live discussion) and so I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to see at HIMSS. As someone who follows the changes in healthcare technology every day, I’m expecting lots of evolutionary changes and very little revolutionary.
As I think about it, I’m trying to imagine what someone could announce that would be revolutionary. That includes thinking back to past HIMSS to what announcements really revolutionized the industry. I can only think of two announcements that come close. The first announcement was when the meaningful use regulations were dropped right before the ONC session at HIMSS. Few people would argue that meaningful use has not revolutionized healthcare IT. Certainly many people would argue that it’s been a revolution that’s damaged the industry. Regardless of whether you see meaningful use as positive or negative, it’s changed so many things about healthcare IT.
The second announcement that stands out in my mind was the CommonWell health alliance. I’m a little careful to suggest that it was a revolutionary announcement because years later interoperability is still something that happens for a few days at the HIMSS Interoperability showcase and then a few point implementations, but isn’t really a reality for most. However, CommonWell was a pretty interesting step forward to have so many competing EHR companies on stage together to talk about working together. Of course, it was also notable that Epic wasn’t on stage with them. This year I’ve seen a number of other EHR vendors join CommonWell (still no Epic yet), so we’ll see if years later it finally bears the fruits of what they were talking about when they announced the effort.
The other problem with the idea that we’ll see something revolutionary at HIMSS 2016 is that revolutions take time. Revolutionary technology or approaches don’t just happen based on an announcement at a conference. That’s true even if the conference is the largest healthcare IT conference in the world. Maybe you could see the inkling of the start of the revolution, but then you’re gazing into a crystal ball.
The second problem for me personally is that I see and communicate with so many of these companies throughout the year. In just the last 6 months I’ve seen a lot of the HIMSS 2016 companies at various events like CES, RSNA, MGMA, AHIMA, etc. With that familiarity everything starts to settle into an evolution of visions and not something revolutionary.
Of course, I always love to be surprised. Maybe someone will come out with something revolutionary that changes my perspective. However, given the culture of healthcare and it’s ability to suppress revolutionary ideas, I’ll be happy to see all the amazing evolution in technology at HIMSS. Plus, the very best revolutionary ideas are often just multiple evolutionary ideas combined together in a nice package.
