Did You Miss the Bus at HIMSS 2014?

No, I don’t mean literally did you miss the bus.

No, I don’t mean literally did you miss the bus. I don’t even mean, did you miss the bus that was part of Intermountain Healthcare’s great exhibit at HIMSS. I mean more figuratively, did you miss the bus at HIMSS?

It is easy to get lost at this mega show at the intersection of health, healthcare and information technology. There are acres of exhibits from companies large and small. Taken together all this stuff is somehow supposed to map to a better future in healthcare. But to use another cliché, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. Just as there are information silos in the health industry, it is difficult to see beyond the silos at HIMSS. How does all this technology fit together? Why is one solution better than another? How does it improve clinical workflow? How does it really improve patient care? Indeed, it’s all such a jumble that even someone like myself who has spent his entire career in healthcare can feel overwhelmed.

I hope you at least had an opportunity to stop by the Microsoft booth. Working with our device and solution partners, I think we were able to paint a picture of how things can fit together from the largest enterprise hospitals right down to the patient’s own home. I hope you were able to experience the excellent range of mobile devices that enable clinical workflow from the smartphone in your pocket to the big screen in your living room. I hope you had a chance to see and test out the work we are doing in health analytics, communication, collaboration, productivity, and cloud services to name just a few of our core capabilities.

But if you really needed help getting a grasp of the big picture, there is another exhibit I hope you visited during your stay at HIMSS. It is the Intelligent Hospital and Intelligent Home exhibit. Nowhere else at HIMSS is there a better opportunity to see how everything fits together from the ICU to the hospital ward; from extended care, to rehab and in the patient’s home. Nowhere else can you get such a complete picture of where technology is taking us and how it will ultimately lead to lower cost, higher quality, more accessible care.

So kudos to Harry Pappas, Dr. Paul Frisch and their extended teams for pulling together what I believe is the most succinct way to experience how technology can transform health and healthcare delivery. Thanks also to more than 70 vendors and sponsors who made it all possible. And thanks to exhibit organizers for the opportunity to provide a short keynote at the Intelligent Hospital and Intelligent Home pavilion earlier this morning, and for the private tour this excellent exhibit.

If you are still at HIMSS and reading this post, rush on over to Hall E and see the Intelligent Hospital and intelligent Home pavilion for yourself. If you do, you’ll no longer feel like you’re missing the bus.