#HIMSS18 First Day:  A Haze Of Uncertainty

Entering the HIMSS exhibit area always feels like walking straight into a hurricane. But if you know how to navigate the show, things usually start to come into focus.

There’s a bunch of young, scrappy and hungry startups clustered in a hive, a second tier of more-established but still emerging ventures and a scattering of non-healthcare contenders hoping to crack the market. And of course, there are the dream places put in place by usual suspects like Accenture, SAP and Citrix. (I also stumbled across a large data analytics company, the curiously-named splunk> — I kid you not – whose pillars of data-like moving color squares might have been the most spectacular display on the floor.)

The point I’m trying to make here is that as immense and overwhelming as a show like HIMSS can be, there’s a certain order amongst the chaos. And I usually leave with an idea of which technologies are on the ascendance, and which seem the closest to practical deployment. This time, not so much.

I may have missed something, but my sense on first glance that I was surrounded by solutions that were immature, off-target or backed by companies trying to be all things to all people. Also, surprisingly few even spoke the word “doctor” when describing their product.

For example, a smallish HIT company probably can’t address IoT, population health, social determinants data and care coordination in one swell foop, but I ran into more than one that was trying to do something like this.

All told, I came away with a feeling that many vendors are trapped in a haze of uncertainty right now. To be fair, I understand why. Most are trying to build solutions without knowing the answers to some important questions.

What are the best uses of blockchain, if any? What role should AI play in data analytics, care management and patient interaction? How do we best define population health management? How should much-needed care coordination technologies be architected, and how will they fit into physician workflow?

Yes, I know that vendors’ job is to sort these things like these out and solve the problems effectively. But this year, many seem to be struggling far more than usual.

Meanwhile, I should note that there seems to be a mismatch between what vendors showed up and what providers say that they want. Why so few vendors focused on RCM or cybersecurity, for example? I know that to some extent, HIMSS is about emerging tech rather than existing solutions, but the gap between practical and emerging solutions seemed larger than usual.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m learning a lot here. The wonderful buzz of excited conversations in the hall is as intense as always. And the show is epic and entertaining as always. Let’s hope that next year, the fog has cleared.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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