It’s time for the Super Bowl of health IT, otherwise known as the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, which gets underway this weekend in my adopted hometown of Chicago.
With more than 40,000 people expected to converge on McCormick Place to check out the wares of about 1,400 exhibitors and attend more than 300 educational sessions, it’s hard to make sense of it all, but we will do our best. MedCity News Editor Chris Seper and I will be on hand to provide coverage and analysis the whole time, starting with a full day of specialized preconference symposia on Sunday, all the way through the end of the event on Thursday, after all the vendors have gone home.
This will be my 14th consecutive HIMSS conference. In nearly all of them in the past, a central theme usually emerges by the second or third day. Some years, it is more obvious than others.
I was just about to write how nothing is immediately apparent now, but HHS officials, true to their history, waited until late on a Friday afternoon to release a major document, and this one will have people talking at HIMSS.
As previously promised, HHS announced that it wants to shorten the 2015 reporting period for Meaningful Use to any 90 consecutive days rather than the full year, but the newly released proposal does not stop there. HHS wants to simplify the entire program by eliminating a number of redundant or obsolete requirements in Meaningful Use Stage 2 and by lowering the bar to meeting a much-debated engagement measure.
Expect that plan to be on the minds of a lot of people at HIMSS, but perhaps not as much as the bombshell the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology dropped Thursday, in the form of its scathing — though not at all surprising — report on the poor state of data sharing between EHR vendors. We will cover national health IT coordinator Dr. Karen DeSalvo’s press conference on Tuesday, as well as her keynote address first thing Thursday morning.
We also can’t wait to hear what the vendors have to say. Will they admit that ONC is on to something, or will this escalate the apparent feud between market leader Epic Systems and the CommonWell Health Alliance, which represents pretty much every other major player? And how will these vendors’ customers react? It’s impossible to ignore the EHR usability issue anymore, even though the proposed Stage 3 Meaningful Use rules kind of do.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The Stage 3 plan does put an emphasis on application programming interfaces, however, which should be a boon for all of the startups looking to make a name for themselves at HIMSS. These same app developers also should be counting on some consumer-facing health platform to take off, perhaps the new Apple HealthKit. On the other hand, Google Health failed spectacularly, and Microsoft’s HealthVault, like so many other untethered personal health records, hasn’t gained much market traction.
Instead of consumer-controlled PHRs, the digital health/mobile health/connected health — choose your buzzword — action may be around wireless monitoring of patients, if some interviews I recently conducted for a not-yet-published freelance story are any indication. (I was independent for 11 years before joining MedCity News last week.)
As care shifts from hospital to clinic and home and as providers are increasingly compensated for quality rather than volume, healthcare organizations will be upping their investment in continuous monitoring of high-risk patients. Someone will have to produce the monitors, make sure the data flows into patient records and apply analytics, then deliver the results to clinicians in an actionable manner. Anyone who successfully does this at HIMSS and in actual clinical environments will be a winner in my book.
