Planning for HIMSS 11

I recently went online to take advantage of early bird registration for HIMSS 11. This annual HIMSS meeting will take place in Orlando in February. I had put off registering because mostly because I had a really hard time deciding on one of the many pre-conference workshops or symposia offered this winter. Last year I attended the Physician's IT Symposium. There was a lot of good information and I felt I got my money's worth. This year I thought I would try something different. The problem was that there are too many good topics to choose from. I would like to have about 5 clones to attend the conference with me.

There will be a Clinical Decision Support workshop that will focus on CDS and its intersection with quality improvement. I think that innovative developments in CDS will be a focus for vendors of EHR software in the next five years. Use of evidence-based medicine guidelines baked into CDS will inevitably lead to more standardized, high-quality health care across the country.

Another option is the Change Management Workshop. No one can be knowledgeable enough about change management in this era of rapid adoption of technology. As many have discovered, "it's not about technology, it's about people." Despite our best wishes, people are reluctant to change their ways. This is particularly true of many older clinicians who are hoping to retire before all the changes on the horizon in medicine become reality. But, it is also true of people of all ages engaged in the health care enterprise.

One workshop that was hard for me to pass up was Life in the Fast Lane-Privacy and Security in the Age of the Electronic Health Record. Privacy and security issues are among the top concerns of both consumers and clinicians. Health information exchange is mandated in Meaningful Use regulations. Progress will be difficult unless the health IT community can assure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of personal health information in a framework of trust during information exchange. I will never know as much as I would like about the topic of privacy and security.

The HIE in the Era of HITECH and Health Reform Symposium is another session I would really like to attend. Health information exchange is one of technologies that will revolutionize the practice of medicine in the coming years. Getting it right will not be easy. The technological challenges, though daunting, will take a back seat to issues of governance, policy, and consent. I am in favor of a central approach. The federal government, through the state grant program, is favoring a more federated landscape. Both flavors of information will be supported. Purpose of use will probably determine which method is best in a given situation.

Closely aligned with HIE is the Secondary Use of Data Symposium. I was so interested in the topic of secondary use that I chose to make it a focus of one of the major papers I completed in one of my master's degree classes. My short essay of 35 pages just scratched the surface of this subject that cuts across many domains in health IT.

So I chose the ARRA Usability Symposium of all the possibilities. I made this decision, not because I think it is the most interesting to me. From a clinician's point of view it may be the most important however. Also, it is somewhat difficult to get good information about usability. I believe that usability issues have been a major factor that has slowed the adoption of EHR technology by clinicians. While human factors engineering has been applied with great success in fields such as aviation, it has been under utilized by EHR developers. I think one solution is greater collaboration between clinicians and the engineering community. I hope this symposium will provide some tools to help me pull my weight.