In my last blog, I discussed many of the opportunities and challenges for HIMSS Conference attendees. I’d now like to turn to key themes that will be discussed during this year’s conference.
HIMSS is a great opportunity for policymakers and leading vendors to make announcements that offer some insights into where the healthcare industry is going. Over the years, the HIMSS conference has featured major releases from CMS and ONC on interoperability, meaningful use, and key standards initiatives. Last year Seema Verma used the conference to launch the CMS HealthEData initiative. Several years ago, IBM made major announcements about acquiring Truven and other health companies to build their Watson Health mojo.
While recent HIMSS Conference themes often featured providers and electronic health records, this year the unleashing of the consumer and their health data is king. The overall theme slogan is “Champions of Health Unite,” but the key areas discussed will be consumer engagement, interoperability in its latest form, and privacy/security.
A galaxy of current and former government healthcare executives is leading the parade, including HHS Secretary Azar, his former boss Mike Leavitt, the ubiquitous Aneesh Chopra, ONC National Coordinator Don Rucker, and Karen DeSalvo-former ONC National Coordinator. CMS Administrator Verma is back to report on progress with the HealthEData efforts including BlueButton 2.0, and other areas such as “relieving clinical burden.” Standards groups (i.e., HL7) will also report out on work that they have been doing with FHIR, seen by many as the key to a consumer health data revolution.
Major themes from previous years are also being touted again, such as population health, better care coordination, value-based care, telehealth, and HIT and the opioid epidemic. Technologies such as Blockchain (92 search results on the HIMSS19 website), AI (166 results), and IOT (54 results) are still popular. There will be many deeper dives in all these areas as well as specific use cases.
This being 2019 – with an election year looming ahead – it is important to listen to the messaging coming from the policymakers to see where they want to drive priorities over the next 12 months and where areas such as the ONC trusted framework, information blocking and other priorities from 21st Century Cures are going.
What to look for from the feds: What is CMS going to do to really advance consumer engagement and how is the industry responding? Are there new policy areas that are going to be promoted as a first strike against Democratic 2020 health priorities? Many of the government HIT policymakers will be either gone or heading out the government door by this time next year, so this HIMSS is really their final chance to promote their signature programs.
Pay attention to the progress (or lack thereof) presented over the past year. Are you hearing more stories of scaled Blockchain implementations? Are there more parts of the healthcare industry where machine learning is being used to solve key operational challenges? How have the discussions on interoperability progressed? What are the industry and the government doing to implement the cyber recommendations that have come out of several recent major taskforces? Where is the current industry thinking on HIPAA privacy, now that the Office of Civil Rights has released its RFI and questions?
Lots to learn and think about at HIMSS19. Enjoy!