Today’s been a long day packed with meetings at HIMSS 2015. I need to reach out to HIMSS to get the final numbers, but word is that there are over 40,000 people at the show. In the hallways, the exhibit hall and the taxi lines it definitely seems to be the case. I’m not sure the jump in attendees, but I saw one tweet that IBM had 400 people there. Don’t quote me on it since I can’t find the tweet, but that’s just extraordinary to even consider that many people from one company.

Of course, the reason I can’t find the tweet is that the Twitter stream has been setting new records each day. The HIMSS 2015 Twitter Tips and Tricks is valuable if you want to get value out of the #HIMSS15 Twitter stream. I also have to admit that I might be going a bit overboard on the selfies. I think I’ve got the @mandibpro selfie disease. Not sure the treatment for it since my doctor doesn’t do a telemedicine visit while I’m in Chicago.

I’ve had some amazing meetings that will inform my blog posts for weeks to come. However, my biggest takeaway from the first official day of HIMSS is that change is in the air. The forces are at work to make interoperability a reality. It’s going to be a massive civil war as the various competing parties battle it out as they set the pathway forward.

You might think that this is a bit of an exaggeration, but I think it’s pretty close to what’s happening. What’s not clear to me is whose going to win and what the final outcome will look like. There are so many competing interests that are trying to get at the data and make it valuable for the doctor and health system.

Along those lines, I’m absolutely fascinated by the real time analytics capabilities that I saw being built. A number of companies I talked to are moving beyond the standard batch loaded enterprise data warehouse approach to a real time (or as one vendor said…we all have to call it near real time) stream of data. I think this is going to drive a massive change in innovation.

I’ll be talking more about the various vendors I saw and their approaches to this in future posts after HIMSS. While I’m excited by some of the many things these companies are doing, I still feel like many of them are constrained by their inability to get to the data. A number of them were working on such small data sets. This was largely because they can’t get the other data. One vendor told me that their biggest challenge is getting an organization to turn over their data for them for analysis.

While it’s important that organizations are extremely careful with how they handle and share their data. More organizations should …read more

Source:: http://www.emrandhipaa.com/emr-and-hipaa/2015/04/13/a-few-quick-himss15-thoughts/