Dr. A at HIMSS 2010

It's been almost 2 months since the HIMSS (Health Information and Management Systems Society) meeting in Atlanta. And, I've been meaning to write a post about my experience, but I just haven't had a chance to until now. Of course, there has been much written about the event, which is the largest health information technology conference of the year.

It was my first HIMSS meeting and I have to tell you that I felt overwhelmed even before getting there. But, upon entering the convention center, it was just a great experience. I thought that I was going to meet a lot of executives and IT people. Don't get me wrong, I did. But I also met a lot of clinical people - kind of like front line people who also take care of patients every day.

One of the main topics that I wanted to learn about is Meaningful Use. I'm still learning a lot about it, and a lot of it still confuses me. But, it was good for me to learn that a lot of other people are still confused about it as well. I was able to bring home a lot of important information for my practice and for my hospital.

The other great project that I got to take part in is to help out Dr. Val and the Better Health company in coverage of the HIMSS conference. Thanks so much to Dr. Val for the opportunity to participate in such an innovative task. The goal was simple - to interview a bunch of vendors at the HIMSS meeting. The hard part was figuring out how to do that in real time, on the internet, and to give all of you the opportunity to ask questions from wherever you were around the world.

The technical research I had to do on this project was - at times - overwhelming. In my tech planning, I had to make some assumptions of how the room set up was going to be. I already had some of the sound & computer equipment in my possession. It was just hauling all the stuff to Atlanta, hooking it up, and hoped that it would work.

I have to admit that I was holding my breath a good 30 minutes before we went live that first day hoping that an entire disaster didn't happen. If you haven't checked out the results yet, I encourage you to check out the You Tube Better Health page to see what we were able to accomplish. You'll also see an interview I did above.


As a wrap-up, Dr. Val was a guest on Doctor Anonymous Show 150. We talked about the experience and how the Better Health company is positioning itself to cover conference like this in the future. As always, you can listen to the show in the player above. Or, if you like, you can download the show and listen anytime by clicking here. Thanks to everyone who gave so much positive feedback to our coverage at HIMSS 2010!