HealthManagement, Volume 7 - Issue 2, 2012 HIT
The main objective of HIMSS 2012 was helping healthcare IT professionals to achieve new goals while maintaining their organisation’s commitment to unsurpassed quality of care. It was about bridging the gap between meeting requirements and implementing processes.
Hot topics at this year’s conference included:
- Clinical and business intelligence;
- Mobile technology;
- ICD-10;
- Meaningful use; and
- Privacy, security and the connected consumer.
There was a special emphasis on social media at this year’s HIMSS. In fact the conference reportedly set a new world record for healthcare conferences in Tweet volume. The #HIMSS12 hashtag was tweeted a total of 6,438 times in one day and 29,335 times during the week of conference. So who better to deliver the opening keynote than Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter. Stone talked about how Twitter was created and believes it is “not a triumph of technology but a triumph of humanity”. His advice was to embrace creativity and to communicare that to succeed you need to be willing to fail. Other keynote speakers ranged from TV anchors to explorers:
- Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health Informa tion Technology U.S. Department of Health and Human Services;
- Terry Moran, NIGHTLINE Anchor;
- Donna Brazile, Political Strategist and Commentator Vice Chair of Voter Registration and Participation, Democratic National Committee;
- Dana Perino, Political Commentator and Former White House Press Secretary; and
- Dan Buettner, Founder of Blue Zones and World Renowned Explorer.
As well as world records, previous HIMSS attendence records were also broken. On Friday morning, Feb. 24, attendance at HIMSS12 reached 37,032 attendees, surpassing the HIMSS11 attendance figure of 31,500. These people came to network and to learn from their peers about the latest developments in healthcare IT. Presentations and roundtable discussions ranged from protecting privacy without harming patients and strategic technology planning in hospital design to laboratory data interoperability and IT governance.
