The Future of Healthcare Takes Center Stage at HIMSS18
Well-established enterprise organizations, long considered the foundation of our modern healthcare system, and new startups have both promised a much-needed disruption in healthcare IT. And HIMSS18 attendees would certainly agree. The annual conference renewed our inspiration—the Healthcare Revolution is alive and well and gaining momentum.
The transformation of healthcare is alive and well and never more evident than at this year’s HIMSS18 (Health Information Management Systems Society) Conference and Exhibition held March 5-9 in Las Vegas. For five days, more than 43,000 attendees converged on the Convention Center at the Venetian to witness current and future technologies that promise to “reimagine” our struggling healthcare system.
Concepts and buzzwords describing what were once thought of as hopeful but distant initiatives, are now becoming realities. Artificial intelligence (AI), patient engagement, the application of machine learning on precision medicine, and blockchain are now the foundations of the new startups gaining momentum in their quest to change a system that has been, at times, resistant to change.
One of my favorite takeaways from the conference was something I heard at a breakout session on AI. “Where reality intersects with hope, there is often turbulence.” Those of us who have dedicated the better part of our lives to the advancement of healthcare know this all too well.
On Monday afternoon at 5:00 pm, the conference kicked off its keynote event. Always highly anticipated and viewed as a barometer for the future climate of our industry, this year did not disappoint. Eric Schmidt, technical advisor and former Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc. (parent company of Google) electrified the thousands of guests in attendance. Among the highlights, Mr. Schmidt repeated an announcement made earlier that same day about a new cloud healthcare API and challenged the audience to avoid “repeating the infrastructure work that we’re building” and to focus instead on innovation.
Describing his future vision, Schmidt said we should look at the opportunities to scale our innovations in the new healthcare landscape. “Scale changes everything. Scale changes the rules.” He went on to suggest that new technology should be used to keep doctors working at the level that matters most: “We want everybody practicing up to their level of license. We want the patient involved, but we want the doctor working at the doctor level, not at the administrator level.”
Population health, machine learning, and AI became my deep dives at this year’s event. No longer are we tossing these terms around hoping for the technology to catch up to the hype. Use cases and applications are a reality now, directly leading to the promise of what is no longer merely disruption, but instead the sustained longevity of true change.
On the clinical side of things, precision medicine is also on the launch pad. A topic I love reading about, is the prospect of a healthcare system that focuses on a specific individual’s care based on their DNA is mind blowing. Technologies in this space have the potential to unlock the mysteries of cancer as well as chronic disease and illness.
I was reminded recently by a colleague who attended this year’s conference that the technology is no longer the goal. Instead, it’s just the means to a more noble end—to cure and enhance lives. The only way this can happen is by continuing to use technology in new and different ways, utilizing all the data we’ve been recording to rewrite diagnosis and treatment paradigms.
Actionable data will be the key. We’ve been accumulating it for years. Now, what are we going to do with it? If you attended HIMSS18, you likely came away with more than a few good ideas.
Connect with me via Twitter @drscottvinci! Be well.