Last week my pedometer called to alert me to suspicious activity on my count—I'd logged so many steps over the course of four days at the CHIME and HIMSS conferences in Orlando that the device assumed someone else was using it. If you don't get the joke, you've never been to HIMSS. The number two topic of conversation there (second only to healthcare technology) is whether or not you wore the right shoes. As a friend said, at HIMSS there's no such thing as the "right shoe."
By the way, although the steps on my pedometer were all me, I assure you I had nothing to do with the emails that someone in Turkey sent to everyone in my address book after I used the hotel's free wireless Internet access.
Here are a few other notes and observations from the show (mostly of a more serious nature than shoes and Turkish malware).
1.The only guarantee: There are no guarantees
The healthcare field faces plenty of uncertainty—what will future stages of meaningful use require? Will healthcare reform survive legal and political challenges? What will accountable care organizations look like? How will we share health data securely? There are lots of questions and even more answers.
Despite the old saw, there really are some guarantees about the future of healthcare, says Nate Kaufman, managing director of Kaufman strategic advisors in San Diego, who spoke at the conference.
He says he guarantees the industry is not going to get huge increases in reimbursements, payers aren't going to make up for Medicare and Medicaid shortfalls, accountable care organizations aren't going to be getting big bonus checks in the mail in the next few years, and Republicans are not going to repeal healthcare reform—because if they did they'd have to come up with a whole 'nother way to keep the healthcare bubble from bursting.
One last guarantee from Kaufman: "2016 is when all the fun starts."
2.There's one in every crowd
One of my favorite moments in the show came when Kaufman was asking his audience of a few hundred people true or false questions.
"True or false?" he asked. "By 2016 most records will still be paper-based."
The rest of the room chuckled. It was mostly a nervous chuckle. Because that's one more guarantee: Everyone knows that one doctor who insists that things will never change.
3.Someone better pull over and ask for directions
The industry has come a long way in the past few years—getting closer to achieving meaningful use, hammering out interoperability issues, kicking around ideas about the privacy and security and other perennial bugbears. But there's still a long way to go and healthcare technology leaders have a lot of different ideas about just how to get there.
One CIO I talked to said she has absolutely no problem sharing her data with other organizations—even competitors. Come one, come all and let's get going for the patient's sake, she said. When I repeated this comment to others throughout the course of the show, reactions were mixed. Some CIOs agreed. Others blanched at the idea. A few said it's a lovely but impossible dream.
The reaction from vendors? Mostly they wondered if I would give them her email address.
4. What's the opposite of sexy? ICD-10
The semi-looming ICD-10 coding changes have definitely been overshadowed by meaningful use. And, frankly, they're just not a lot of fun to talk about. Still, the ICD-10 sessions at this year's conference were well-attended—standing room only in at least one case. It might not be the sexiest topic, but it looks like healthcare IT leaders might be getting ready to move it off the back burner. Is there such a thing as a middle burner?
A colleague of mine—an HIMSS first-timer—decided to hit one of the ICD-10 sessions. Regardless of how in-vogue the topic is, he said he decided it was time to leave the room when the audience started making insider jokes about coding … that he didn't get.
5. Can you hear me now?
I conducted a lot of interviews at HIMSS, and recorded most of them, so I was very interested in what John Umekubo, MD, from St. Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco had to say about advances in voice recognition technology and how it can help physicians write their clinical notes. I can't tell you what he said just yet—I haven't had time to transcribe the interview.