Twenty-four thousand healthcare IT attendees descended on New Orleans late last month for the HIMSS07 conference. H. Stephen Lieber, president and CEO of HIMSS, was challenged on the decision to hold the conference there, New Orleans supposedly overrun with crime and not fully recovered from Hurricane Katrina.
In a meeting with HIMSS staff following the conference, Lieber said he never doubted his New Orleans decision. “I knew they were up to it,” he said. He also pointed out that the one comment he heard most from conference attendees was how happy they were the conference was delivering hope and resources to New Orleans.
This kind of hope is what the conference itself accentuated, along with the overall message that healthcare IT is advancing and can help overhaul an ailing American healthcare system.
In a Town Hall meeting of the Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare Information Technology at HIMSS07, healthcare IT czar Robert M. Kolodner, MD, said he fully expects to achieve the president’s goal of electronic health records for most Americans by 2014.
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, in a keynote closing speech at the conference, announced that the majority of the market is now adopting the president’s value-driven healthcare plan, which entails the establishment of healthcare IT as a foundation.
The secretary said that for many years healthcare information technology has been “but a distant vision,” but now we are close to achieving interoperable standards and a system-wide transformation.
Also at the conference, Alisa Ray, executive director of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, said CCHIT has so far certified 57 vendor products, representing 25 percent of the ambulatory EHR market. Seventy-five percent of those are products used by two- to five-doctor practices. The majority of those certified are considered small businesses, with earnings of less than $10 million, Ray said.
The dark shadow cast on all this good news is a question of whether privacy is being adequately factored into all this rapid progress
On Feb. 21, Paul Feldman, a leader in privacy advocacy and chair of an HHS workgroup on healthcare IT privacy, stepped down due to lack of faith in the system. Others voiced this same concern. In the HIMSS07 Town Hall, Kolodner declined to address the issue, saying only that HHS is working quickly to replace Feldman.
Many say that if the government doesn’t solve double-digit healthcare inflation, then the market will. If nothing else, the vibe at the HIMSS07 conference was just that. Innovative market leaders are forging ahead on a daily basis.
Perhaps Gen. Colin Powell, in his closing remarks at HIMSS07, said it best: “The world has seen changes, but it is fundamentally changing for the better.”
