By JONATHAN BUSH
The headline said that the chief of HIMSS sees “seismic shifts” in the health IT landscape.
I sure hope so because I’m betting on it.
As many of our employees know, HIMSS is a massively important leader in our space, and their annual conference—this year it was held in Orlando and set an attendance record of over 30,000 people and 1,000 vendors—is our chance to feel small and uninvited. It is a club of large vendors and large buyers. Very large deals, you might say ‘seismic’ deals, requiring long-term multimillion dollar commitments in EHR and practice management systems, go down at the HIMSS conventions.
Obviously, our consistent criticism has been that the balance sheet impact of such investments is not sustainable by any health care institution for long, BUT ALSO, the information that comes from such investment…well…sucks.
It doesn’t suck because the IT departments that buy and run these EHR andpractice management systems are bad (they may or may not be, I have no idea, but that isn’t the problem). It isn’t because the systems being purchased don’t work as advertised (I have no idea if they do, but I assume the answer is ‘yes’).
