Health IT

HIMSS keeps growing, and news keeps flowing

We’re just starting to recover from the week that was HIMSS15, the largest health IT […]

We’re just starting to recover from the week that was HIMSS15, the largest health IT event of the year by far. Attendance at this year’s event totaled a record 43,129, easily surpassing the previous high by more than 5,000, set at HIMSS14 in Orlando, Fla. The fickle Chicago weather even cooperated most of the time.

I’ve wondered a lot over the last few years if HIMSS was getting too big for its own good. It’s certainly gotten too big for a scrappy little news organization like MedCity to provide blanket coverage of something with upwards of 1,300 vendors and close to 400 educational sessions.

Vendors tell me they don’t close many deals at HIMSS, but it’s an opportunity for them to meet with lots of their clients in the space of a few days. And they have it somewhat easy. The vendor show lasts only three days. We have to cover nearly five full days of events, including some great preconference sessions on Sunday.

Lots of vendors also take advantage of the big stage to announce news, and announce they did. Just take a peek at this list of press releases from just those vendors who chose to send links to the HIMSS media relations people. It doesn’t even cover what was certainly the most significant news from any vendor at HIMSS15: the launch of IBM Watson Health, an effort that Big Blue is dedicating 2,000 people to.

As we reported:

The deals and partnerships are an exclamation point that gives more purpose not just to Watson but to Apple as well – through the deal Research Kit suddenly becomes more relevant. It also bundles in traditional health players like Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic and grabs two young stars in health data and cloud services – Explorys and Phytel (IBM acquired them both), respectively.

While vendors like the fact that so many customers are around at HIMSS, we like the fact that so many vendor executives are present. We could act fast when we got a tip that GE Healthcare wanted out of the inpatient EHR business after years of losing clients to the market leaders, Epic Systems and Cerner. It took just a few minutes to get Jon Zimmerman, GE Healthcare’s general manager of clinical business solutions, to confirm the story.

Zimmerman said GE hasn’t decided whether it would sell or simply wind down Centricity Enterprise, but it’s hard to believe someone out there wouldn’t offer money for that asset.

The other big news from HIMSS was the uprising against the plan to ease the only part of Meaningful Use Stage 2 that hospitals and doctors don’t have direct control over: the requirement that at least 5 percent of patients “view, download or transmit” their records through a portal or personal health record.

The Friday before the conference started, HHS proposed reducing the threshold from 5 percent to one single patient. That set off former national health IT coordinator Dr. Farzad Mostashari and a small but growing — and vocal —community of activist patients. As we were the first to report, Mostashari called for a “day of action,” in which a large number of people request access to their health records to prove that their really is demand for it.

One such activist, Regina Holliday, explained her feelings on video. Her initial plan to have the uprising on July 4 may change, as it’s become clear that a lot of people will want to ask for their records in person or over the phone, and medical practices and hospital records departments will be closed that day, but the idea is germinating on social media.

What remains to be seen is whether wide swaths of the public join in, not just the most vocal advocates like Holliday.

What was your highlight of HIMSS15? Leave your comments below.

 

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