Elusive interoperability will be tackled at this year’s HIMSS
Digital health tools will be front and center at this year’s conference of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society,
as health IT professionals and clinicians discuss EHRs, data security and protection, and interoperability.
More than 43,000 people are expected to attend the annual conference and exhibition, to be held in Orlando, Fla., this week. Over 1,200 vendors will be exhibiting. Attendance last year clocked in at 41,712.
Health information exchange, interoperability and data access will get the most airtime of the topics covered at the conference, with 134 scheduled events across the five days.
On Monday morning, Ginni Rometty, president and CEO of IBM, will deliver the keynote address. One of IBM’s biggest pushes into health IT is Watson Health, the healthcare analytics arm of its cognitive computing program.
The conference will also serve as backdrop for a slew of new product announcements including a mobile platform that brings social media features to clinicians for communication about patients; a group of tools for creating data warehouses so healthcare providers can derive value from the electronic medical record data they’ve collected; and a healthcare operating system that facilitates value-based care by standardizing clinical and claims data from existing EHR systems.
On the final day of the conference, former Speaker of the House John Boehner will deliver a talk, “Political Perspectives on America’s Future.” The government’s effects on health IT, including changes under the new administration, will be a focus of the conference, as attendees and vendors discuss the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act and the 21st Century Cures Act and other policies.