Posts

What I learned at my first HIMSS

First and foremost, this is a BIG show. Okay, obviously this is a big show. But it’s important to understand this isn’t the type of trade show where the cool startup with hopes and dreams of changing the world can make a huge splash. At least, not without a plan.

As a first-time attendee, there were some confirmations and surprises that led to a few insights. Here are some tips to help kick-start your strategy for your first HIMSS.

Stop singing the same old song

Reporters are booked solid well before the conference begins and they are hearing “stories” all day. If it’s your first HIMSS, you may be surprised by the amount of similar ideas, products and solutions across the board. Let me tell you, the editors are not.

Whether it’s your first HIMSS or your 30th, make sure you have something to say. Passion plus results are rewarded in almost any industry and the same rings true in Healthcare IT. Don’t offer one without the other.

No one wants to hear about a product and all the technical aspects you have painstakingly perfected. They want to hear about what your solution is going to do for them (or their readers) now.

Don’t get it twisted. We are all very thankful for all the hard work, but the fact of the matter is there is too much going on to appreciate all of that hard work. Have something to say with weight.

Do your research before you go

Don’t waste time deciding what you’re going to do once you get to HIMSS. Everything moves too fast, and it takes too long to get from one place to the other. The conference may be several days long, but it goes by in a blink. Have a plan as an attendee or as an exhibitor.

Most of all, don’t make meetings with people that don’t make sense. Time, space and (good) coffee are precious luxuries at HIMSS. Don’t waste them.

Talk to people, and ask questions

Not just any questions – ask the one that you are hesitant about.

As a millennial, I think that we undervalue face-to-face interactions. There is something about being in front of people where you can get answers to questions you might not ask in a formal meeting setting or email. For one, they can’t just ignore your question.

Before all of my telehealth peeps give me a hard time – don’t worry, I still have no interest in physically stepping into my doctor’s office on a regular basis. Telemedicine rules!

A lot of flash doesn’t mean a lot of cash…flow

It was sad to see the booths with a premier spot just watch all the attendees walk by without giving their super cool mini golf game a try. Booth traffic success comes in layers, and although this conference was in Las Vegas, you can’t just take a shallow approach to entice the shrewd people of this trade show.

Take a note from the brilliant Lisa Chernikoff, “As savvy marketing professionals know, the best trade show marketing strategies start early and establish a regular cadence of communication.” Emphasis on start early. Your booth traffic strategy should not rely solely on a game of putt-putt. Meetings with a purpose, strategies that give attendees something they can use to fix their problems and well thought-out strategies for making conversation are what seem to be the keys to success at mega trade shows such as HIMSS.

The thought of tackling this type of huge trade show without a specialized agency and expecting results brings to mind a few analogies

  • Scuba diving without a tank
  • Planning a wedding for tomorrow
  • Teaching a fish to ride a bicycle
  • Baking a cake with cardboard appliances

And of course, the rumors are true – you will always be lost, hungry, searching for an outlet and totally amazed at what we are doing as an industry to improve healthcare. Now, I need to go buy some AirPods and avoid ever using or hearing the word leverage again.

Where is Interoperability Going?

When health IT professionals head to HIMSS, interoperability will be a major issue, as it has been for many years. Various interoperability solutions are always on the horizon, but never quite come to fruition. The reasons go beyond technological capabilities; healthcare organizations and IT vendors have simply not been able to think outside the box of their preconceived notions.

A classic example is the recent announcement by a very large EHR vendor of new enhancements to its interoperability solution that allow providers who use that EHR to collaborate across organizational boundaries. Now, it’s all to the good that a clinician in one healthcare system will be able to not only view patient data in a different system’s EHR, but will also be able to schedule appointments more efficiently and message providers in the other healthcare system about a particular patient.

However, a user of that EHR will still not know that a patient got a flu shot at CVS or was admitted to a hospital ED that doesn’t have that EHR. In fact, except for the exchange of hard-to-parse clinical summary documents, the provider won’t know about anything that happened to the patient in care settings with disparate EHRs.

The central problem here is that the major health IT vendors would like their customers to use only their products and no one else’s. They’ve managed to convince some organizations that “rip and replace” is the solution to their interoperability ills. It is, however, no panacea. Aside from being a very expensive approach that disrupts the organization for a year or more, a unity system cannot provide all the functionality that healthcare organizations need, and the big vendors are not very amenable to connecting with third party app vendors.

The advent of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) promises to allow EHR users to expand their functionality through third party apps without having to pay for special interfaces. To their credit, the big vendors have shown some flexibility by letting outside vendors play in their digital sandboxes and develop FHIR-based apps. However, the majority of these apps are being used mainly for viewing EHR data. Moreover, FHIR has still not solved the problem of EHR-to-EHR interoperability.

So what is to be done? I’d suggest that, for starters, ONC and the private consortia working on interoperability consider a different role for EHRs that was suggested by Mandl and Kohane in a New England Journal of Medicine article. In that piece, the authors predict that with the spread of open standard software APIs, EHRs might become commodity components in a larger platform that includes other transactional systems and data warehouses running myriad apps. These apps could have access to many sources of shared data beyond a single health system’s records.

To visualize what this means, think about all the apps you have on your smartphone. Many of these apps work together. For example, Uber uses your GPS to figure out your location, as do shopping and movie apps. Your calendar app knows what time it is in your time zone.

If an EHR could contextualize all of the data coming into it from different apps, and combine them in ways that support medical decision making, it would be a much more useful program. It would maintain its role as the center of clinical workflow and documentation, but outside apps could also improve those functions, making the EHR more usable for clinicians.

That’s all very fine, and the same system might be used to expose EHR data to apps that consumers could use to monitor and maintain their health. But how do we achieve interoperability between EHRs?

I don’t presume to have the answer, but I have a couple of suggestions. First, health information exchanges need to step up their efforts to link together healthcare providers that use different EHRs. Some HIEs have focused on providing more analytic support to customers, which is certainly important but doesn’t meet the need to make a broad range of outside data available within the EHR workflow. To the extent that HIEs expand the types of data they can exchange, they will become more valuable. And if they adopt the emerging FHIR-based APIs, they will eventually find ways to exchange relevant data at the granular data level.

Interoperability at a granular, discrete data level must move beyond interfaces between disparate systems, which are too expensive to set up and maintain. The holy grail would be to develop the ability for EHRs to generate some kind of standard data set far more extensive than today’s CCDAs that would be both machine readable and understandable to clinicians using any other system. Perhaps FHIR could do that someday, but it would still require some kind of universal network to distribute the data. Maybe blockchain or some other secure peer-to-peer system will meet this challenge.

That’s all my crystal ball shows me today. But if the past is any indication, something totally unknown lies outside the box of the future.

HIMSS 2018: Tips for Staying Healthy from the Amendola Team

HIMSS 2018: Tips for Staying Healthy from the Amendola Team

Back in 2016, the Amendola Communications team collaborated on a blog post offering tips on how to stay healthy at HIMSS. With HIMSS 2018 coming up right as the U.S. in the midst of a flu epidemic, that sage advice is even more apropos.

You’re about to find yourself in a largely environmentally closed room with 42,000 of your industry compatriots. Many of those folks first walked through an airport and shared the same recirculated air in a jam-packed jet. It’s like a scenario from a disaster movie.

Even without all of that, it’s still a physical and mental marathon. It’s five straight days of being on point, on message, and on your feet. It’s HIMSS! To help you survive it, and perhaps avoid becoming one more tick in the flu statistics this year, here are some tips from the team at Amendola, who have years of HIMSS conferences under our belt.

Michelle Noteboom, Senior Account and Content Director: Assume you won’t get eight hours of sleep a night but find a way to get at least six. Make sure to drink a ton of water, which helps to hydrate you from all those late night adult beverages, and, seems to help a bit with swollen feet. Assume your feet will be swollen and your shoulders aching from lugging all the trinkets you collect from exhibitors. To that end, don’t forget Advil and Band-Aids for your feet. Bring healthy snacks for your hotel room, and finally, don’t skimp on coffee. That weak hotel room stuff doesn’t cut it when you have to be “on” for 18 hours straight. HIMSS requires a Venti Starbucks!

Margaret Kelly, Research Coordinator: Bring an emergency kit. For women, pack a clear-plastic and easy-to-get-to bag full of small amounts of Tylenol (or pain reliever of choice), Tums, “handitizor” (as my granddaughter calls it), bandages for the shoe blisters, safety pins, Chapstick, protein bar, and breath mints. The men’s version just substitute the safety pins with duct tape, and a fanny pack for the plastic bag!

Todd Stein, Vice President: Be sure to schedule time for lunch. Many people fill up their schedules without remembering to leave time for eating. Me, for instance. Every darn year.

Amy Koehlmoos, Senior Account Director and Resident Germaphobe suggests bringing the following:

  • Raw almonds (they’re small, portable, healthy and provide good energy)
  • Anti-bacterial wipes (for the trays, arm/head rests in the plane; and the faucets, door handles, light switches in the hotel room)
  • Small Ziploc baggies (I put remote controls in these as those suckers are the #1 place for nasty germs in hotel rooms!)
  • Hand sanitizer (you shake lots of hands at these events!)
  • Earplugs (help you get a good night’s sleep in a hotel, where there are often weird sounds and loud neighbors)
  • Shoes with arch support (my philosophy is you look better wearing an orthopedic pair of shoes with confidence than you do limping around with a pained expression on your face and a pair of sassy heels on your feet)
  • Phone/connections to loved ones (mental health is important and having easy access to pictures of family and the ability to Facetime them at night makes it a bit easier to be away from home).

Ken Krause, Senior Account and Content Director and our other Resident Germaphobe:

  • Drive instead of fly. Planes are breeding grounds for germs, and they keep recirculating.
  • Assume everything you’re about to touch has been previously touched by a small child with a runny nose. Proceed accordingly. That goes double for your hotel room.
  • Eat like your significant other is there watching you. Nothing good comes from visiting the snack machine.
  • Try not to touch your eyes or nose after touching a common surface such as a doorknob until you can either wash your hands or use a cleanser such as Purell.
  • Get to sleep as soon as you can rather than staying up watching TV or reading. Sometimes business travel calls for working on minimal sleep, but don’t go out of your way to get into that state.