Anticlue

HIMSS 2008 Perceptions - A first glance

HIMSS does a great job of organization for this event. I arrived on Sunday Morning for the CPHIMS Review Course. The course was a quick overview, covering material and questions. Good News, is it looks like HIMSS is coming out with a book of knowledge and best practices mimicking PMI or IIBA. It is definitely needed as some of the material is dated. All in All it was a comprehensive overview, but it lack smooth synchronization of the materials. Additionally, the update moves the certification to a global perspective instead of the current US-centric view. Perhaps more of HIMSS as an organization's focus?

From the Education Sessions on Monday, I attended Marketing IT, Physician Portal, and Portable Computing. Marketing IT had some great insights, like an IT department should have a finance expert, and a communications expert. Additionally branding and marketing significant clinical workflow enhancements - like E-Signature. The Physician Portal overview of Catholic Health West Portal had an excellent CMO Presenter, candid and realistic. Main lesson learned, is for the portal to be personal, a single single-on solution is needed first. Additionally a portal can be used as an attraction mechanism for physician practice specialties. Want to attracted a Cardiology department, integrate the portal view. (Including all the cardiac imaging solutions would be ideal). Finally the case study with the motion computing C5 at John Hopkins was insightful. It is nice to see a company work with the nursing staff to come up with a good solution. For a wireless laptop, one should at least pilot the C5. I'm assuming the next version will really be ready for primetime, if they encompass all of the lessons learned from the C5 deployment. Best Quote is for this presentation, turning nurses into lamas on legs - oh so true!

The vendor demonstrations on the floor are simply massive. It takes some time to walk the floor. I'm going to focus on a couple of insights, first truly eye catching booth is the Siemens Booth. There was a wonderful eye-catching 30 ft long, 10 ft high thin computing screen on a white background. This very high tech solution caught my eye marketing the innovative MedSeries 5 solution, which surprised me. Innovation and Legacy is centralized view. All in all there was a lot of broadcasting Partners long term partnership with Siemens especially the revenue management, interesting since I don't think the install has started yet. Soarian is powerful with the workflow rules engine, it is a great concept to build a product around. I wonder if the functionality is up to the level of the more senior products. Maybe they even have plans to offer electronic signature within the product, like Cerner's profile.

Cerner has one of the best booths, they took their Kansas City Cerner DisneyLand on the road. The Director of Emerging Technology was sharing the vision of the Cerner Future. He took the time to listen and understand everyone's questions, and provided clarity of the vision. He did a great job! For the inpatient room, medical device connectivity was portrayed. A smart bed connected to millennium for patient alerts, ie a fall prone patient is one the edge of the rail unscheduled. The patient ID had an ultrasound tracking mechanism about the size of a quarter. Apparently RFID has too much interference for a reliable range currently. Wave Form Monitors where serially interfacing into a USB Bus converting the signal into the Cerner Millenium System. Motion Computing's, C5 display was offering up a Cerner Millenium Session through citrix for nursing and physician documentation. One large computer screen mounted behind the patient had all needed information, authentication was still via a login id. Although it would be cool if there was some mechanism to identify who was in the room via badge employee ids, maybe next year. On the other side of the room, where the patient TV normally is, there was a smart TV, displaying who was the attending and his information from the credentialing system. Choices ranged from, My PHR, My Care Team, TV, Movies on Demand, Games on Demand. (Remember the average gamer is now 41) It was a great vision of the future.