Memotext

HIMSS15 – HIMSSANITY a Meta View from the Floors

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Amos Adler What a crazy few days its been at HIMSS. While I can describe all the sessions and attendees I’ll spare you what you can read on their website and focus on the experiential part of the event. Think 43,000 people crammed into the cozy corner of Chicago at McKormick Place, the world’s second largest exhibition hall. What’s interesting about HIMMSS is its massive scale, overwhelming number of people, exhibitions and the sheer size of the booze, cappuccino, swag filled conference. One of the best parts is the exercise of walking 8 miles a day all around the event hall. I wanted to understand the commercial focus of the event from a competitive perspective as well as to get inspired and understand the marketplace. HIMMS Probably the best part of HIMSS is connecting with the people that are from all walks of HealthIT. To me at MEMOTEXT, it’s interesting to see the types of new offerings that have been developed and the spectrum of digital health products in provider to patient care. There seems to be a lot of attention on interoperability but in a strangely non-collaborative competitive way. Competitive interoperability! That’s my new HIMSS word for the day.   Common themes: I kept hearing how crazy everyone thought the size and scale was and the offering, sessions and keynotes were. The scope and magnitude of HIT is evident in the size of this event and how it keeps growing year after year.   Commercially speaking there is a lot of focus on technology features as opposed to strength of integrative capabilities. I heard about the “single source of truth” on a few occasions, referring to the data repository and sharing that seems to be the focus of interoperability. There were also a number of offerings that seemed to try to engage both the patient and the provider simultaneously in a way that I felt lacked design thinking. But who am I to judge? Its hard to be everything to everyone whether you are a software vendor or a conference. HIMSS is huge, we’re all excited to be there, and the parties are great. The beat goes on and the journeymen continue to thrive.   AMOS ADLER M.Sc. FOUNDER & PRESIDENT img35 Amos brings speech, mobile and social technologies together to create mobile (mHealth) and telehealth patient adherence programs. Since 2008, Amos has led the design and deployment of dozens of digital patient adherence and behavior change programs globally while advocating for evidence-based approaches to technology-based behavior change. With a background in user oriented design methodologies, user-requirements elicitation, finance and enterprise scale technology deployment, Amos focuses on solutions solving real-world business requirements with patient centered designs while understanding the challenges of change management in clinical settings. Prior to founding MEMOTEXT, Amos held multiple technology and finance related positions within the Bell Canada Holdings family of companies as well as a background in social and private real estate development. Amos holds a M.Sc. in Analysis, Design and Management of Information Systems from The London School of Economics in London England, graduating with distinction was highlighted by his work within the launch of the world’s first independent exchange for international wholesale telecom capacity. Amos speaks regularly at events such as: mHealth, Stanford Mobile Health, Health Datapalooza, Genentech FutureMed2.0 and has guest lectured at the Univ. of Toronto