HIMSS 17

The biggest event for IT Healthcare, HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition has happened this year in Orlando. 45000 participants, a record of exhibitors and a massive presence of Brazilian professionals, always looking for new knowledge and a clear proof of the maturity of Brazilian IT Healthcare Market.

My first HIMSS in 1998, also in Orlando had around 12000 participants. Almost nobody from Brazil. The main subject that time was the "Millennium Bug", terrifying Software Developers and CIOs. Almost twenty years after several waves of trends and technologies, as use of INTRANET, adoption of RIS, HIPAA compliance, interoperability, BI adoption, we arrive in 2017 and 3 major subjects are in focus: use of Cloud Computing, Population Health Management and Machine Learning/AI, with its big star Watson, but with other competitors starting to move in this field.

Following this trend, the Keynote Speaker was Ginni Rommety from IBM, and her speech about Cognitive Computing offering some examples already in place, specially in Genomics. Also she mentioned the adoption of Watson in India, Thailand and China for precise medicine and the success as a tool for diagnosing cancer more precisely.

In the exhibition, there were other companies as for example Health Catalyst. Intended for anyone who is interested in machine learning in healthcare, the tool they offer, provide topical blog content, weekly, and a collaborative, open source repository of standardized machine learning methodologies and production-quality code—and makes it easy to deploy machine learning in any environment. This is a novelty.

During CHIME sessions , Cloud Computing was subject of some Focus Groups. IBM and Amazon asking CIOs about the adoption of Cloud solutions in their Hospitals, and listening back the resistance to deploy core business systems in Cloud, despite the excellence of internet services and very good levels of service guaranteed by the vendors. But, what happened if your EHR is out in case of failure ? There is still this type of "resistance", but is an irreversible trend. Big vendors are competing and SaaS is a reality.

Another trend, is PHM ( Population Health Management ). As defined by PHILIPS, "Population Health Management is the aggregation of patient data across multiple health information technology resources, the analysis of that data into a single, actionable patient record, and the actions through which care providers can improve both clinical and financial outcomes.''

Using algorithms and BI tools, several companies pop-up solutions in this field, a tool that should be observed closely and quickly adopted in Brazil by the health insurance companies in order to know better the population they take care and anticipate costs and offer tailored health programs to their customers. In the exhibition, some Israeli software companies were there offering their solutions.

These were the 3 main subjects I ve listened and observed in Orlando. There is a fourth one, in the horizon, but not well discussed and adopted, the Blockchain technology. But this is a subject for another article