I’m sure that some of you might have seen me complaining on Twitter about the challenge of trying to sift through the 300+ educational sessions at HIMSS. I even tried to convince the HIMSS expert Neil Versel to offer up some suggestions on which HIMSS 2012 sessions to attend. He suggested just leaving all of the education times open and decide later. It’s a good idea, but I think I prefer meeting with people more than some of the available sessions. Neil enjoys the sessions a bit more than I do.

One of my favorite old Neil Versel posts was when he basically said, “HIMSS is more than just the exhibit hall.” With 300+ sessions at HIMSS 2012 there should be something you will find interesting, so HIMSS should be more than just the exhibit hall.

Today I started ripping through the HIMSS sessions to try and identify those I found interesting and worth putting on my schedule. While they might make it on the schedule, that doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily attend. I debate attending based on the flow of the conference, people I’m with at the time, and if I’d already heard enough on that subject for one HIMSS. Plus, I often put multiple sessions that are at the same time on my schedule. In those cases, I use the above criteria to decide which ones I should attend.

The other X Factor with this all is that I still have to schedule my meetings with vendors I find interesting during HIMSS as well. I’ll start doing that now that I know which HIMSS sessions are happening when. At least now I won’t schedule a meeting with a vendor during the Biz Stone keynote. That would be a travesty.

Below you’ll find my HIMSS 2012 schedule of sessions (which will likely continue to change), but for those interested here’s the process I did to find interesting sessions. First, I added the exhibit hall hours and keynotes. Next, I went through the HIMSS Specialty Programs and HIMSS Social Media Center schedule (My HIMSS Panel on Wed, 2/24 from 4-5 made it on my schedule from this list). Then, the HIMSS Education section has the sessions broken out into “Core Education” areas. I found the Federal Participation at HIMSS 12, Senior Executive sessions and EHR Best Practices sections quite interesting.

There you have it. I’m sure I missed some sessions I should attend, so if you know of some that you think are worthwhile do let me know and I’ll check them out. Now without further ado, my current schedule for HIMSS 2012:

As you can see it’s going to be a full and crazy week for me at HIMSS 2012, but as I said before HIMSS is great for me. Everyone goes there with a little different plan on what they want to accomplish and learn, but hopefully my list of sessions will be helpful to someone else navigating the HIMSS 2012 gauntlet.

Let me know if you have any questions about particular sessions and I’m happy to tell you why they made the list as well.