Well, I must admit that I’m a bit overwhelmed by everything I’ve seen and heard at HIMSS 10 in Atlanta. This thing is enormous. Although, I think I’m also trying to overcome the lack of sleep. Taking the Red-Eye from Las Vegas was the right choice, but I’m paying the price today for not having much sleep. Not that any of you really care.

What I’ve quickly realized is that I’ve over scheduled my time at HIMSS. This really isn’t too much of a problem for me since I LOVE being busy. The only problem with it is that it means that I won’t be able to create nearly as much content from the show as I’d like to create.

No worries though, I’m taking good notes and I’ll have plenty of great content to share with you over the next few weeks after HIMSS as well as during HIMSS. I have posted quite a few updates on my twitter account, @ehrandhit, and plan to do a lot more. Take a look through my updates to see some interesting items I heard during a briefing.

As I’ve talked with people at the conference, as expected, the EMR stimulus, meaningful use, certified EHR and everything related to those subjects is the main focus of discussion. I think that’s actually exciting. It’s a topic that everyone is kind of unified around. It creates a nice energy at the conference and is a topic that you can talk about with anyone.

Interoperability is also a really major discussion at this conference. I’m not sure how much real progress has been made, but there’s a lot of talk. I know I’m interested in a meeting I have setup with a person at ONC that works on the NHIN and CONNECT. I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

Another interesting thing will be all the false information related to the EMR stimulus. It’s amazing how many professionals in the industry don’t even understand the details of the EMR stimulus. This is a problem and could have some ugly consequences down the road.

Watch for some more specific coverage of the conference tomorrow. Tomorrow is a very full day for me with some really exciting events including: the CCHIT town hall meeting, my Meet the Bloggers Session, an interview with one of my favorite EMR CEO bloggers, Evan Steele, and then of course the New Media Kick Off Event tomorrow night.

The CCHIT town hall should be quite lively since you know how much I love them. I’m thinking I might try and live blog it, or at least lots of tweets about the event.

I’ll admit to not being the most expert person on HIE, RHIO, NHIN, and all of the other acronyms associated what really is just creating systems and structures for sharing healthcare data between various doctors and systems. However, I do have some knowledge in the area since I believe all of these things will be important for those using an EMR. So, I was surprised when I’d never heard of HHS’ health connect software.

Here’s a short bit from Government Health IT of the government’s connect software’s latest update:

The Health & Human Services Department (HHS) has updated the government’s Connect software to improve information security and enterprise services for organizations that want to use it to exchange health data, said its senior architect.

Connect is federally developed software that lets agencies and healthcare organizations share health data by using the protocols, agreements and core services that make up the nationwide health information network (NHIN).

HHS is trying to develop improvements in the Connect gateway quickly so it can serve as an early model of the NHIN, executives said yesterday.

“The intent of the plan is that Connect will be a reference implementation of NHIN and provide a mechanism for organizations that are building gateways to have the ability to test against it and to provide for feedback to the NHIN specification group,” said Les Westberg, Connect technical lead in the Federal Health Architecture program and an executive with Agilex.

Is there anyone that knows more about this program that can give us a review of what’s going on. I’d love to hear about how far it’s come, the challenges its overcome and the challenges it still faces.

In fact, if you are someone working on one of the acronyms listed at the top that are trying to provide the all to elusive healthcare data interoperability I’d love to learn more about what’s going on in the comments or through a guest post if you have a lot to say.