I’d been meaning to post this for a while, because I hope that it will be well attended. CCHIT and various open source EMR groups, advocates and friends will be meeting with CCHIT during HIMSS. I first read about this from Neil Versel where he said this:

Healthcare FOSS guru Fred Trotter and Linux Medical News editor Ignacio Valdes, M.D., are leading the event, Monday, April 6, at 2 p.m. in Room 10d at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place at 22nd Street and South King Drive in Chicago. Trotter called the encounter “like offering to meet with the Rebel Alliance at the annual Death Star conference,”, but I imagine they intend for things to be civil.

I love the Death Star reference. This should be a pretty interesting meeting. I was talking to someone today who suggested that they were going to come to some sort of consensus at that meeting. I suggested that they probably wouldn’t come to a consensus, but at most agree to disagree. However, I’m a strong advocate for communication and understanding between parties. So this is a good thing.

The best part for those who can’t attend HIMSS is that they’re planning on doing a webcast of the event. Here’s the details:

Date: Monday, April 6, 2009

Room 10d, Hyatt McCormick Conference Center, Chicago

Session #1 1:00 – 2:00 PM CDT

Interoperability 09 and Beyond: a look at CCHIT’s roadmap for the future

Session #2 2:00 – 3:00 PM CDT

Open Source Forum: a dialogue on certification for open source EHRs

Here is the link to register for the webinar:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/429901059

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing
information about joining the webinar. We will also be recording
these sessions, and plan to make the media files available on the web
for later downloads.

There’s actually 2 sessions and I’m really interested to see how it goes. I wish I could be present, but I’ll definitely be at the webinar and posting my thoughts on twitter. I do wish that CCHIT would add a ustream video feed of it as well.