HIMSS NHIT Week: Nine Trends, One Theme

In early October, HIMSS celebrated National Health IT Week. With webinars, in-person meetings, and multiple articles daily, there was quite a bit of content to cover. This content was collected and analyzed as part of a recent report that explored trends in the healthcare industry, which fell into nine categories:
* Electronic Health Records (EHR) * Cloud Computing * Interoperability * Blockchain * Telehealth * Supply Chain * Precision Medicine * Security * Patient-Generated Health Data

Despite the variety of focus areas, one common theme cropped up across all: integrated technology. While HIMSS and other leaders in healthcare IT recognize the advances made (e.g. paperless claims, blockchain etc.), they also recognize that these advancements can cause more complex issues. The biggest challenge being that the infrastructure of yesterday cannot support the needs of tomorrow.

“People are looking up and saying the infrastructure we put in place ten years ago isn’t robust enough today,” said Blain Newton, executive vice president of HIMSS Analytics. “What we’re seeing as far as a state of the market is acceleration beyond the EHR.”

For example, while EHRs are close to be universally adopted, only 2 percent of hospitals have a single-vendor enterprise with the average healthcare system connects with 15 vendors across all its business verticals. The lack of consistency between systems brings about the topic of interoperability, as made apparent with recent healthcare giant mergers such as CHI/Dignity and CVS Health/Aetna.

But–as we always say here at CNSI–where there is a challenge, there is an opportunity; where there is an opportunity, there is innovation.

Apparently HIMSS CEO Hal Wolf agrees. He recently announced that the organization will partner with with AcademyHealth on the next Health Datapalooza event to “ensure the secure and meaningful transformation of data into new capabilities that deliver innovation in health transformation.” We look forward to seeing what comes out of this event.

What do you think will help address this issue of integrated technology? Join the conversation on Twitter by tweeting along with @CNSICorp.