This is a report from the HIMSS conference (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) held this year at the Chicago McCormick convention center. The show has about 25,000 attendees and a ton of exhibitors; more of them but booth size smaller than the RSNA (Radiology Society of North America) conferences that I’ve reported on in early December that take place in the same venue.
The focus of this conference is healthcare IT solutions, mostly software and some networking. The big news at this year’s show was the Obama economic stimulus plan and how it might impact each vendor / customer / attendee. Everyone seems to be trying to position to get some of the stimulus money, either directly or by positioning so that their customers can use it to buy some of their products.
I gave a talk entitled “Unlocking the Value of Digital Pathology”. It was well attended (≈200 people) and I think well received (at least, nobody walked out in disgust :) Seriously there were a lot of questions and a gratifying number of people stayed afterward to talk with me. Pathology is not in the mainstream for HIMSS attendees but there was evidently interest. I started with Digital Pathology 101 and talked about the technology (scanning, viewing including an ImageScope demo, managing, analyzing) then played our DIHC demo movie, and spent time talking about the IT implementation challenges like storage, bandwidth, monitors, etc.
The show exhibit hall seen from above is pretty impressive:
Not quite the RSNA-style cities but still there were some huge booths. The three biggest were GE, Philips, and Siemens; here’s the GE city:
Like many other exhibitors GE featured the federal stimulus package prominently:
The Philips Booth was equally large, but a lot simpler and cleaner:
I met with Ann Walton and George Will of IBM Storage Solutions:
They want everyone to buy their storage arrays for storing digital slides. We talked about having a range of solutions including something at the low end :)
Lawson had a cool booth featuring big pictures made out of little pictures:
It would be fun to do this combining lots of 300MB digital slide images :)
The DOD had the world’s first camouflaged trade show booth:
Google made a big splash last year when Eric Schmidt gave the conference keynote and announced Google Health, but they were pretty scaled back this year; the impression left is that they’re not serious:
There were a lot of storage vendors exhibiting; EMC are just waiting for digital pathology to become mainstream so they can fill their arrays with digital slides:
The server manufacturers like HP were all exhibiting; and all featuring some tie-in to healthcare IT, but honestly this is pretty much commodity hardware, and it is support and service that differentiates:
The biggest single booth was the “Interoperability Center”, where any vendor could have a little section of the booth to demonstrate how they interoperate with standards. On the whole it was a good idea but not fully executed; walking around it seemed a bit confused:
The Microsoft booth was the busiest at the show…
… there was a lot of buzz about Amalga, a new product which is a data warehouse for healthcare IT information:
I learned a lot about this, got a demo, and talked to some product managers about the technology.
Some vendors will do just about anything to get attention; this guy was doing some really cool pool tricks which however had nothing at all to do with healthcare IT:
Finally I thought this poster in the Sun booth was kind of weird; are they saying they offer band-aid solutions:
(not clear if this poster went up after IBM announced they were not going to buy Sun :)
The McCormick Center is pretty amazing, among other things they have some cool fountains:
All in all a whirlwind few days; lots of meetings and discussions, and perhaps from all of them a few will lead to useful projects. I certainly learned a lot, and it’s clear that as we grow and move further into the clinical space this world will become increasingly important to us.
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