Well, this is technically my second or third day, but this is the first official day of HIMSS. It’s a mad house like you can imagine and the vendor hall is as big as you’d expect. You need about 3 weeks to go through it. I actually decided to do a walking meeting with someone and we basically walked the whole exhibit floor twice. Luckily, the conversation was good and we dove into some interesting topics. I also told them about my future mobile strategy for Healthcare Scene. She liked it. Hopefully I can roll it out in the next few months.
My day happened to start off with a lot of discussion on interoperability and HIE with MAeHC and then Orion Health. I think it’s really interesting to see the progress we’ve made when it comes to interoperability and HIE, but I also found it interesting that Micky Tripathi from MAeHC still described healthcare interoperability as being in its infancy. I largely agree with him and it’s really too bad. Although, it was also interesting to compare that to Orion Health talking about how they’ve proven that HIE can work. Plus, they also noted something I’ve written multiple times: Private HIEs are growing faster than the Public HIEs.
I’m still really torn on the business model for interoperability and HIEs. I don’t see a clear model in most situations. I even saw one tweet yesterday that talked about taxing on a per patient basis to pay for the HIE. I heard that in NY they’re actually literally working on a tax to fund it. However, I really think that calling it a per patient tax is a really bad way to describe the funding. I’ll certainly be covering more of my interoperability and HIE discussions in the future. Watch for those blog posts in the coming weeks.
I also did a lot of social media talk today. Together with Shahid Shah and Cari McLean we had a discussion about Social Media and Influence. It was great to see so many friendly faces in the audience. I feel lucky every chance I get to hear Shahid talk. He’s really good at reframing things in interesting ways. Plus, Cari has a unique perspective to offer from her perch on top of the HIMSS Social Media tower. I previously noted that social media has just become an integral part of HIMSS. What’s interesting is that most of the companies at HIMSS haven’t created it as an integral part of their company. Many are still learning, but it’s great to see them learn. I hope many will attend the Health IT Marketing and PR Conference where we dive in a lot deeper on these topics.
As I said to someone today, social media can provide value to every company, but not every …read more
