HIMSS 09: Visualizing Solutions
Today was my final day of coverage at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) Convention. The conference officially wraps up tomorrow, but alas, the ADVANCE office calls. I must say I'm bummed to be missing tonight's soiree at Navy Pier, which features a Beatles tribute band, but at least camera shy attendees will have one less media shutterbug to avoid.
Three days of HIMSS action have given me plenty of questions to ponder and stories to cover. This morning, I attended a roundtable discussion about patient identity issues, which promises to be a key issue as providers begin sharing data. As moderator Beth Just, MBA, RHIA, president of Just Associates, noted, you're only as strong as your weakest link. In health information exchange (HIE), that means your institution can have endless measures to verify patient identity, but if another institution's protocols lapse it can lead to inaccurate records or misidentified patients, throwing a whole monkey wrench in the exchange.
As luck would have it, we had an HIM celebrity in our midst. Vera Rulon, MS, RHIT, CCS, FAHIMA, president of the American Health Information Management Association, attended Just's session. I was also pleased to see another RHIA and a few information systems staffers at the roundtable as well.
In the afternoon, I checked out a personal health record (PHR) point/counterpoint that raised some interesting questions about the value of PHRs. The pro-side touted PHRs as a move toward consumer-driven health care and said PHR use would reduce medical errors, promote coordination of care and cut medical costs. The con-side focused on the fact that PHRs are basically a "bucket with nothing to put in it" and instead advocated for funneling efforts toward EHR adoption, which would ultimately yield pre-populated PHRs. For consumers, "pre-populated" means less effort on their end--and who wants added effort?
After three days of storming the exhibit hall--and I know some booths still managed to escape my determined, information-seeking path--I've sufficiently exhausted myself and my camera battery. Today I checked out a couple product demos, including a new scanner from Bowe Bell and Howell. Call me a visual learner, but no matter how much someone tells me how a product works, it always helps to see it in action. I also jumped on a tour of one of the 50 examples of communication between systems at the Interoperability Showcase. The scenario I saw showed how systems from different vendors can communicate to improve immunization tracking. The showcase was packed, which led to the inevitable traffic jam, but it supplied a fix for attendees craving to see the mystical "interoperability" in visual terms.
That does it for my ventures in Chicago, but I'll be working hard to deliver more comprehensive coverage of the HIMSS Convention--watch for the wrap up in our April 22 Web update.