Overdue for an update - HIMSS, Acquisition

Wow, I haven't updated this in over a week. Last Saturday the 23rd, I drove to Orlando for the EHRVA meetings before HIMSS. The EHRVA is the EHR Vendor's Association, and it is an organization where EHR vendors meet to discuss what is going on in the industry and try to work together toward the common goals of increasing EHR adoption. The meetings were great as always. We had Dr. Kolodner speak with us over dinner. He was a great speaker even with Laryngitis. Sunday, we went to the EHRVA reception, and then we went to the HIMSS executive reception. I saw many people I knew over the night. It is always good to run into people you have worked with in the past and it is good to meet new people too. :) To make it better, my Vols beat Memphis to get the #1 ranking in basketball. Sunday night, Tony, Jay, Phil, and I had a good time at Don Pablos.

Monday, I saw Bill Frist speak as the opening speaker of HIMSS. I thought he did a pretty good job. He added some humor with his comments that Democrats care more about Healthcare right now because their primary voters are demanding it and that Republicans will get more into it later. He talked some about how even in the 80's, he was reporting data on the transplants electronically because it was required to report infections, complications, etc. He seems to be more into Global health and children's issues, but it was interesting to get his perspective. He seems to be a good advocate for HIT.

I went to a few other sessions on Monday that mainly discussed interoperability and quality. Nothing really new, but it is always good to hear other groups speak to gain perspective. Also, the acquisition of Bond by MediNotes was announced on Monday. While I am sad to see the Bond era end (scrubs anyone?), I think this will be good for the product and will get it into production much faster. Bond Clinician is a fabulous product that uses cutting edge technology. Now, it will have the staff to sell it and get it out into more hands. :)

We went to the Histalk reception on Monday night. It was a BLAST. It is so amazing to me that this blog is done anonymously and done so well. I love reading it, and it is a must check site for me every day. As we arrived, Healthia Consulting had a table set up with name tags already printed. Two free drink tickets were given out, and the bar was flowing (even though it was awfully expensive after the first two drinks). I met several people from Ingenix, and we discussed ENS a little. It sounds like they are overcoming some of their struggles from the past year. I met several other people from different places. I enjoyed Jonathan Bush's speech at the reception (wow 8 awards out of 18!). I had never met him, and I really enjoyed hearing his take on the industry. He is definitely deserving of the "CEO you would most like to have a few beers with" award that he won at the reception. The video of the awards was hysterical and very well done. I was very impressed. Travis, Don, Mike, Tony, Phil, Jay, and I all had a celebratory toast. We ended up in the Peabody bar, and it was fantastic. Scott joined in later, and we had a great time. Later, we went to Howl at the Moon before heading back to the hotel and hanging out. It was a VERY late night, but it was one of the most fun nights I have had in a while.
Fun Mike was definitely out. Mad Dog came to party. We celebrated. It was a blast.

Unfortunately, the morning came. :) Boy, it was ROUGH to get up and going. I got back in gear pretty well by 10, but I was struggling the rest of the day. I attended two classes - one on PHR's and one on Web 2.0 and Healthcare. The PHR class was pretty good. There were a lot of questions after the panel finished, and the discussion was interesting. I am not sure where I think PHR's will end up, but I think there are many issues that will keep them from taking off for a while. For example, I do not think physicians will trust patient-entered information as much as clinician entered information. I think EMR's that will feed PHRs and that will provide a basis in the future. The Web 2.0 session was awful. He just talked about the portal they set up instead of an EMR. He continually bashed EHRs, and the portal was just a Sharepoint kind of solution. I saw no web 2.0. I walked the Exhibit hall for a long time and looked for interesting new things. I had a blast at the Avaya booth. They had some cool software to call patients and get information by prompts, and they had some pretty neat disaster recovery and mass contact of providers.

After the show, the Medi-Bond crew went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. We didn't know that it was a long way away, so we all climbed into a mini-van for the cab trip of a life. The cab driver acted like he knew where it was, but then he kept asking where it was again. $45 later, we exited the nasty hot cab. Dinner was good. We all experienced Mr. Bill for the first time where you guess the total bill amount. None of the Bond crew had beginner's luck.

I will update more later. I am still trying to absorb coming home from HIMSS, the science fair project from hell (this will be a post, trust me), and then this acquisition stuff. Then, Mike's mom, Alice went into the hospital. Talk about a busy week.