My #HIMSS14 Preview

As most of you know, I’ll be heading on my annual pilgrimage to Health IT Mecca (otherwise known as HIMSS14). HIMSS 2014 is taking place in Orlando and I have another jam packed schedule with ~20 confirmed meetings and ~10 possible evening socials. Of course, this doesn’t count any of the sessions I plan to attend or time I’ve set aside to discover what’s in the enormous exhibit hall.

In case you don’t read EMR and EHR (shame on you, but this can be corrected), yesterday I posted Some Frank #HIMSS14 Advice (plus some cool preview pictures of the event). If you’re going to HIMSS, it’s well worth a read. I think it also illustrates how important the people at HIMSS are to me. Maybe that’s why I love Social Media at HIMSS14 so much. In fact, you’ll see in my preview below a great mix of social media and interesting companies.

Now for a preview of some of the things I’m looking forward to at HIMSS 2014 and a few things that caught my eye (Apologies in advance to those things I forgot to mention).

#HealthyHIMSS14
If you check out that link, you’ll see the unofficial HIMSS 14 5k, a HIMSS Dance Meetup, a HIMSS Tennis Meetup and the official Yoga and Wellness Challenge. I love that there’s at least some effort to be healthy and have some fun at HIMSS. Should be some fun events. I’ll be attending the ones that aren’t way too early for a west coast blogger like myself.

Stoltenberg Consulting
I found Stoltenberg Consulting’s idea to ask attendees “What If…” during HIMSS. They’ll be offering the option in their booth, but you can also get started on social media using the hashtag #WhatIf4HIT. I imagine Stoltenberg plans to take those questions and see how they can help solve the problems which makes the idea even better. There are always plenty of people at HIMSS asking What If, but not nearly enough people making those What Ifs a reality.

#SocialMedia and Influence Meetup
This meetup will include the spectacular Cari Mclean and Shahid Shah and I’ll be tagging along as well. This will be a real interactive discussion between all the participants. So, come to the event ready to ask questions, get answers, and share your experiences and viewpoints. I hope that this will be a sliver of a preview of the Healthcare IT Marketing and PR Conference I’m organizing in April.

5th Annual New Media Meetup at HIMSS
Unfortunately, this event has reached capacity (as it does every year). Imagine 200 of the best and brightest in healthcare IT social media in the same room. Everywhere you turn you see an amazing blogger or someone you follow on Twitter. It’s awesome. A big thanks to Stericycle Communication Solutions for sponsoring the event.

Santa Rosa Consulting
Besides always having a great booth at HIMSS, they also offer a full suite of consulting services around all the topics you would expect: ICD-10, meaningful use, BI and analytics, and HIE. Plus, Santa Rosa Consulting’s part of the larger company which owns the HIE company, Sandlot Solutions. They’re announcing a new Sandlot Connect Lite product that serves as an entry-level electronic notification service, providing the first level of information sharing between ambulatory and inpatient healthcare settings as patients are admitted and discharged. You can find them at Booth 5689 and 5783.

#HITsm Meetup
Always fun to meet many of the people you’ve shared tweets with in person at the #HITsm meetup. I hear this year they’re going to do more interacting and meeting and less single stream discussion. This makes me happy. Plus, I hear they have some giveaways this year as well.

Capsule Tech
Props to KNB for holding a Google Plus video hangout HIMSS pre-brief with Capsule Tech. Then, I have to take the props away for them having me hold an embargo until Monday. However, Capsule Tech did provide me some insight that I’d never heard about hospital readmissions. Plus, I found their HIMSS announcement an interesting evolution in their work. Too bad I can’t tell you more. However, I’m hoping to have a post about it up on Hospital EMR and EHR on Monday.

Healthcare Analytics
You won’t have to look for this. In fact, this is a warning that this is going to be the top buzz word at HIMSS14. I don’t think it’s even going to be close. If someone has more time than me, I’d love to know what percentage of HIMSS exhibitors have a Healthcare Analytics package. I bet it’s huge. What does healthcare analytics even mean? I guess that’s why everyone has a package. No one knows what it means and so everyone has something that does “analytics.” I do analytics too, in excel spreadsheets.

Encore Health Resources
Over on Hospital EMR and EHR, I did an interview with Dana Sellers about the new product their launching at HIMSS: Encore Pay for Performance (P4P) Managed Services. You can read the interview for all the details, but I find it really interesting that a consulting company wants to start taking on some of the risk associated with an organization’s P4P program. I’ll be interested to hear attendees response to this approach and how this plays out over time. We’re at the really early stages of P4P. Also, the Encore Pub Nights at HIMSS are always a nice break after a long day as well. Check those out if you haven’t before.

NextGen Giveaways
Everyone likes a nice giveaway (unless you’re press and they don’t like to give stuff to you). I was impressed by the suite of giveaways that NextGen will be doing at HIMSS. The “selfie contest” is a fun one that leverages social media. I love the prize patrol one as well, but I prefer carrying my backpack instead of another bag. Plus, they’re giving out 4 Grand Prize Vacations. I’d personally want the 5 nights in Rome, Italy, but I’m biased since I lived in Italy for 2 years.

I’ll be interested to hear what other giveaways there are at HIMSS. In past years it seemed they weren’t giving as much away. Maybe I was just too busy in meetings. I did hear one vendor is giving out cool portable batteries to charge your cell phones. Those are nice if you don’t have one.

There you go. A few of the interesting things I’m looking forward to participating in and checking out at HIMSS. I’d love to hear what you find interesting and what you’re looking forward to see in the comments.

Full Disclosure: Santa Rosa Consulting and Stoltenberg Consulting both work with Healthcare IT Central posting jobs and sponsoring newsletters.

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.

   

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