Lots of Interesting Discussions at HIMSS Day 1

Today’s been a really interesting first day of HIMSS. I’d heard good things about the Health IT Venture Forum in past years and so I was really glad to be able to attend this year. Of course, if you’re following @techguy and/or @ehrandhit, then you’ve already read a number of my updates.

I also posted what might be the biggest news coming out of HIMSS 11 today that meaningful use stage 2 will include EHR usability.

I was impressed by the Mitochon systems presentation at the New Venture Forum. I had a great talk with CEO, Chris Riley after their presentation. I really like his vision for what they’re working to create. The more I talk with Free EHR vendors like Mitochon, the more I can see the potential of their business model. Shahid, the Healthcare IT Guy, told me that he knew of a couple other free EHR at HIMSS. I didn’t get those requests, so I’m interested to know the other Free EHR competitors. (Full Disclosure: Mitochon is an advertiser on this site)

http://twitter.com/#!/techguy/status/39338895376125952
As you can see from that tweet. I was really intrigued by ZyDoc. I’ve been fascinated with NLP since last HIMSS. Combine that with the increasingly popular auto coding engines that are coming out and it’s a really interesting offering.

One of the presenters at the venture forum said the following about the hospital connectivity market. I wonder what people think about it:
http://twitter.com/#!/techguy/status/39349553530404864

http://twitter.com/#!/ehrandhit/status/39345036491489281
I’ve always been fascinated with China. Add in my interest in EHR and of course I loved the presentation on EHR in China. This company is even more interesting since they have built the EHR with the Chinese character set and it seems like they understand the Chinese healthcare culture.

http://twitter.com/#!/techguy/status/39351869767688192
I loved how the Rothman score tried to quantify a patient’s condition for early warning. To see the score change on a graph really does change your view of a patient’s progress. I just wonder what a hospital’s liability is if the score changes and they don’t follow the alert. I also wonder how many false positives it would produce. Some sort of summary like this has to be the future. I really hope that they’re successful.

The following tweet was the best quote by Aneesh Chopa, CTO of the US. I also loved his energy. I bet he’d be a fascinating person to have dinner with.
http://twitter.com/#!/techguy/status/39398019925286912

I also had a chance to meet with Shareable Ink, but I think I’m going to save my discussion of their technology for an after HIMSS post. So, watch for that. It’s really neat technology.

The increasingly famous Brantley Whittington, CEO of spoof EMR company Extormity, stopped and chatted with me. I’m still holding out on saying who’s behind Extormity, but just look for the Brantley Whittington name badge and you’ll be able to figure it out early (or check back Tuesday when I’ll post it).

I also had a good chat with Dynamic Health IT during the HIMSS opening reception. Check them out for EHR certification and meaningful use consulting. Or as they describe it, the gap analysis for hospitals interested in becoming certified and showing meaningful use. Yes, they help with the hospital EHR self-certification.

In the evening, I got the chance to meet with Dana Sellers, CEO of Encore Health Resources. I told one PR person that emailed me that I have a policy of only meeting with smart people. Dana definitely fits this category.

As most of you know, a lot of my focus is on the ambulatory EMR world and so I appreciate Dana taking some time to talk with me (and really educate me) about healthcare IT in the hospital world. One of the most incredible things they told me was that Encore Healthcare has 143 employees and they’re only 2 years old. That’s some pretty good growth for an EHR consulting company.

One thing I was impressed with was Dana’s candor with her previous company (which was sold to IBM) and now what they’re able to do with Encore Health. Dana was partially embarrassed to admit that in the previous company they worried too much about processes and not enough on getting the data back out. She did say that she thinks that Encore Health is in a much better position based on changes to technology and the environment to really get the data out of these systems so they can focus even more on the quality of healthcare that’s provided.

So much more that I could share from my talk with Dana. It probably deserves it’s on post and most certainly the things she shared with me will come up in future posts. Needless to say I was extremely impressed with Dana and so it’s no wonder why Encore Health has been so successful. I might have to stop by Tommy Bahama’s again just to hang out with more smart people.

Finally, a couple interesting tweets I saw during the show:
http://twitter.com/#!/psweetman_live/status/39367086765514753
and
http://twitter.com/#!/biomedsociety/status/39357644800000001

Isn’t it cool that I can cover sessions that I didn’t even attend thanks to Twitter?

Much much more tomorrow. Unless I’m too tired from all the parties;-)

EMRandHIPAA.com’s HIMSS11 coverage is sponsored by Practice Fusion, provider of the free, web-based Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system used by over 70,000 healthcare providers in the US.