This week I finally got my flight and hotel all lined up for my trip to HIMSS. Thanks to Practice Fusion for sponsoring that part of my trip to HIMSS. It’s greatly appreciated. I think Orlando is going to be a great destination for HIMSS and the energy and excitement is going to be something else thanks to the EMR stimulus money. It should be a pretty exciting event with far too many people, sessions and vendors to take in.

I’m still considering throwing together a New Media Meetup at HIMSS like I did last year. It was a lot of fun and worked out well since we just partnered with MEDecision to pull it off. If you’re interested in helping put something like that together or attending an event like that, let me know and I’ll be sure to let you know the details. I personally really like these sorts of intimate meetings with interesting people who understand New Media like blogs, twitter, Facebook, etc.

What other conferences do people attend? I’ve been to a number of different EMR events this last year. The Mobile Health Expo was a fun event and should get better as it grows. I really enjoyed mixing it up with all the doctors at AAFP (even if I did get kicked out of a session since I wasn’t a doctor).

I’d wanted to go to MGMA this year, but couldn’t quite swing it. The good thing is that the 2011 MGMA Annual Conference is in Las Vegas (my backyard) and so I can easily attend while still enjoying my own bed. HIMSS 2012 is also going to be in Las Vegas which is very convenient for me. Obviously, you can see I have a bit of a bias to EMR or healthcare IT related conferences in Las Vegas. It’s just so much nicer and luckily a fair amount of them come to Las Vegas.

I heard there’s going to be a healthcare portion of SXSW in Austin. That’s a conference I’ve always wanted to go to. Health 2.0 could also be interesting, but I find it much more consumer health app focused than EMR and doctor focused.

Are there any other EMR related conferences that I should keep my eye on?

There are a ton of EMR resources online these days. I remember when I started this blog, there really was only a small handful of people talking about EMR. Now, it’s kind of exploded and there’s conversations happening all over the internet about EMR. That’s why I’m particularly grateful for those who read this blog, participate in the comments and find value from it.

One of my more recent finds is the group forums on LinkedIn. They’re definitely not perfect and sometimes get too much spam, but they are an interesting place to discuss EMR. Here’s an example of a group about Small Medical Practice EMR and PM Solutions. Pretty much a perfect match for this blog right?

One of the key things I like about the groups on LinkedIn is that people’s comments are tied to their LinkedIn profile. This is pretty neat since then I can see what’s behind the comment that someone is making. I can better understand the perspective they have on the situation and why they might be commenting a certain way. It’s also cool, because I’ve gotten to meet a bunch of interesting people in the EMR world. Plus, I know quite a few of my readers come from LinkedIn as well.

Of course, you can also catch up with us on Twitter – @ehrandhit (just passed 5000 followers) and Facebook – EMR and HIPAA Fan page.

I also must admit that I’m always astonished and flattered by the people I see sign up for the EMR and HIPAA email list. That list has really grown and it’s pretty amazing to think that someone wants what I’ve written in their email box almost daily. It’s pretty humbling to see the list of doctors, practice managers, EMR vendors, and other healthcare IT people that sign up for it. So, thank you.

I’m usually pretty quick to adopt technology and ways to promote this blog. For example, I’ve been on Twitter for a long time as @ehrandhit. It’s taken a while to get to 4472 followers on Twitter, but it’s pretty cool to see that there are that many people interested in electronic medical record on Twitter.

For some reason though, I’ve kind of avoided using Facebook to promote this site. I think that there’s probably a part of me that wanted to keep my personal life (Facebook) away from my EMR life. Not because I have anything in my personal life to hide. Probably more about the other direction. I didn’t necessarily want to talk about EMR in my personal life. Which doesn’t make that much sense, because I love talking to doctors or other people about my EMR stuff.

Well, all of that background aside, I decided it was time to start a Facebook fan page for EMR and HIPAA. So, if you’re on Facebook, feel free to say you like EMR and HIPAA. Right now it pulls in both this site and my EMR and EHR website. I imagine I’ll tie it into Twitter as well at some point. That way you’re getting all the great EMR info you want.

Also, if you haven’t found it already, you can also subscribe to EMR and HIPAA by email. One person told me it’s their daily morning read. That’s a little scary for me to think about, but I’m also flattered that it’s the case.

Everyone loves to talk about all the various PHR solutions out there. Ever since Microsoft and Google joined the PHR arena with HealthVault and Google Health there’s been a whole lot of discussion out there about patients accessing their records.

With all of this PHR discussion, I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen a discussion of a PHR built on top of Facebook. At this point, there’s little point in arguing against the power of Facebook. A popular tech website, even ushered in the decade of Facebook (the 90′s being the decade of Microsoft and the 00′s being the decade of Google). I knew Facebook was really going mainstream when I started getting friend requests from my aunts and even a great aunt.

Now that so many people are on Facebook, then why not create a PHR on top of it? I don’t know that many regular people who care about PHR, but they care a lot about Facebook. Might Facebook be the way to get people to actually start using a PHR?

I’m sure just having Facebook and healthcare information in the same sentence is going to bring out the privacy and security nazis in a big way. No doubt, there would be a lot of privacy issues you’d have to address in order to make it happen. There are also some issues with Facebook being your platform (see the latest with Zynga and Facebook). However, what’s so crazy about a PHR on top of Facebook?

If it is crazy, then maybe that’s a good thing. I bet we’ll see a Facebook PHR sooner rather than later.