The past few days I’ve been hanging out in Denver to speak at the annual GE Healthcare Centricity LIVE conference.

The past few days I’ve been hanging out in Denver to speak at the annual GE Healthcare Centricity LIVE conference. I also had an opportunity to attend a number of meetings with GE executives and catch up with some of our joint customers and partners.

On Monday morning Microsoft sponsored an executive breakfast right before the opening of Centricity LIVE. I’d like to thank all the brave soles who got up very early to join us and hear my keynote, “Journey of a Lifetime”. I’d also like to thank my colleagues from the Microsoft Store in Denver who hosted a “devices bar” on the exhibit floor of the Centricity Live conference. This provided a great opportunity for attendees to get some hands-on experience with so many of the excellent “clinical grade” devices running Windows 8 including, of course, one of my favorites—the Surface Pro 2 that I am using to my write this post as I fly back to Seattle even closer to the clouds on Alaska Airlines. 

Speaking of closer to the clouds, there was definitely a theme at Centricity LIVE. Like other industry solution vendors, GE Healthcare clearly sees clinical computing, medical imaging, and clinical collaboration moving to the cloud. I was very pleased to gain further insights to the company’s plans to improve EMR, HIS, clinical, financial, and operational solutions for hospitals and clinics around the world using secure, flexible, highly scalable, and less costly cloud services.

Health IT is moving in new directions, directions that will increasingly include patients and consumers. A plethora of new consumer wearable devices from notable companies will be hitting the market this summer and into the Holiday Season. The challenge for healthcare providers will be how to incorporate and use the data that will be spinning out from these devices to improve health and healthcare delivery.

The future of wearable devices was something we discussed during a series of new videos recently released by Intel. Below, you can watch the third and final episode of that series hosted by Intel Health and Life Sciences General Manager, Eric Dishman. Panelists included Dr. Andrew Litt fro Dell, Dr. Graham Hughes of SAS, and me. We talk about wearable devices and the potential impact on patient care. You can also see the other clips we shot on making health IT data actionable and the benefits of health IT analytics.

My thanks to colleagues at Intel and also to the many fine customers, partners, and senior executives who met with me during the GE Centricity LIVE event in Denver. There is no doubt about it, we are moving closer and faster to the cloud in Health IT than I might ever have predicted just a few short years ago.