Matthew Holt’s Impressions from HIMSS

I’m still working through some of the various wrap ups from HIMSS that I’ve found. Matthew Holt is always an interesting blogger. Turns out that he’s even more interesting in person. Here’s a few of his thoughts that I think are worth sharing:

Busiest booth?: I think Cisco wins. Maybe it was HealthPresence, maybe the magician—but it was always packed. What I think it means is that mainstream Internet tools are now coming into health care (with some little tweeks). But as MrHISTalk says, putting all the big guys in the A hall was a mite unfair on the C side—although I got to both a little.

Most intruiging announcement?: Epocrates will release a hand-held and web-base EMR app for the iPhone and other handhelds. Why is that interesting? Because they already have 275,000 docs actively using their tool on a handheld, most on iPhones. If their tool’s any good you have to assume they have a great marketing advantage. If this succeeds there’s no way they remain independent in 18 months.

Most interesting niche company you’ve never heard of whose CEO you randomly met at a party?: LiveProcess is a SaaS-based emergency preparedness tool. (I think CEO Nathaniel Weiss said) it has 500 hospitals paying $10K a year each with no customization.

Other interesting niche company?: CPM does CRM outbound marketing for hospitals and as nearly doubled in size during the downturn (video of them to come).

Most interesting philosophical chat?: Andy Weisenthal of Kaiser Permanente discussing how specialists are going to change entirely what they do now that everything in KP is online. One Hawaii endocrenologist is on a jihad to prevent diabetics ending up on dialysis—he’s completely reorganized how primary care docs treat their patients. It’s almost like his goal is to put himself out of a job. Andy said about Healthconnect’s finalization of the $6bn (?) implementation—”It’s not the end, it’s the start”.

It’s also worth linking to Matthew Holt’s interview with Epocrates about the Epocrates EHR. Although, I also just remembered I could embed it below:

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories