Our team just got back from HIMSS 2018; The health IT industry’s big annual event, 40,000 of our colleagues also attended! In addition to the attendees, hundreds of exhibitors, presenters, and events took place at the conference, highlighting a wealth of opportunity in health IT. This year, we noticed the following four topics woven throughout many of the presentations, exhibits and discussions.

Interoperability– Healthcare continues to have opportunities and challenges related to interoperability. TheHIMSS Interoperability Showcase, a 30,000-square-foot exhibition that demonstrated the opportunity to connect health and care, was a great place to get the “lay of the land” on what’s new in the space. The realization of true interoperability continues to face obstacles, with many of the Showcase solutions addressing the following key challenges:

o  EHR Customizationsthat provide the flexibility to meet the unique needs of a healthcare system, frequently at the expense of increased complexity of integrations.

o  The staggeringvolume of data, measured in Petabytes, that healthcare organizations are collecting from disparate sources with the intent to integrate. Tools including cloud computing, data warehouses, and big data will continue to be valuable in overcoming this interoperability challenge and avoiding data silos.

o  Patent matching is critically important to quality and a significant safety concern. In the absence of a national patient identifier,errors in combining multi-sourced patient data are common. As patients seek care in a variety of facilities and data becomes increasingly shared across EHRs and other data systems, a better system must be created to ensure patient matching is improved.

Blockchain– According to Healthcare Rallies for Blockchain, a study from IBM, 16% of surveyed healthcare executives had solid plans to implement a commercial blockchain solution this year, while 56% expected to by 2020. The potential to establish the lifetime history of data related to a person, place or thing has great relevance in the healthcare space – think medical data management for patient history. Ultimately, blockchain offers the possibility to make data more secure, complete and readily accessible, all driving improved treatment efficacy and enhanced privacy.

Internet of Thing (IoT)– IoT continues to have great promise for healthcare, with possibilities spanning remote monitoring to device integration. It can help care teams more effectively monitor patients, efficiently deliver care, and better engage patients in their own care. However, IoT creates a data challenge for healthcare systems to manage, govern and integrate the voluminous and disparate data of the connected devices.

Cyber Security– Cybersecurity continues to rank a major concern for healthcare executives. HealthIT Security recently reported that with two years of a steadily increasing cyber threat landscape with record number of patient records compromised, health organizations extorted financially, and hospital operations disrupted, things will continue to be challenging in this space.Intellimed recently wrote a blog on healthcare cybersecuritythat includes critical prevention steps that we invite you to check out.

As the dust settles from HIMSS18, we’re all back to work energized to make healthcare work its best for all stakeholders – the patients, healthcare systems, and payers. We all know that health IT is a critical part of the healthcare puzzle. We hope you had a great HIMSS18, if you attended, and found our short recap here helpful.