HIMSS

Monday marks the start of National Health IT Week, which runs from June 5 through 9 in Washington D.C. Expect a steady trickle of health IT related stories in the news as the official conference gets underway. Headliners include the usual suspects: Dr. McClellan, the Center for Health Transformation's Newt Gingrich and Carolyn Clancy. Meanwhile, a decent number of HIMSS members will be swarming Capitol Hill, perhaps suggesting that a little more money might be found for healthcare IT projects. Web site

As smartphones with PDA capacity get more common, there's a major push from both Microsoft and Palm to get them into healthcare. Palm released its Treo 700W, which runs Windows Mobile, earlier this year. The PDA goes after healthcare applications that are not written for the Palm OS and was featured at the HIMSS show. Yesterday Palm released the Treo 700P, a new Palmsource-OS based smartphone. The 700P is on the EvDO broadband network, which will help it compete with RIM's Blackberry for …

MEDecision will create 6.5 million "patient clinical summaries" for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois. The Pennsylvania-based software company was involved in the effort to create emergency clinical records after Hurricane Katrina. MEDecision President John Capobianco explained to FierceHealthcare at HIMSS that while less than 20 percent of providers currently use EMRs, their technology can mine claims in real time to create basic records for emergency room care, or to support …

The mood at HIMSS this week was one of barely rational exuberance. America's hospitals are on a building spree, and they are putting new technology infrastructure into their new facilities. They are also in a major round of updating the software they use to run their processes. The exuberance at HIMSS came from the financial success of the major vendors of hospital IT systems like …

HIMSS wraps up in San Diego Thursday morning as 23,500 healthcare tech geeks start to wander home. Most of the action was around the big vertical players like Cerner, Epic, and McKesson, but the tech giants are getting more and more serious about healthcare. Microsoft is introducing products to further collaboration (think instant messaging, plus video, plus Netmeetings) and is working on getting its employees to "eat their own dog food" with Web visits and messaging. Meanwhile, Cisco is …

Tuesday at the HIMSS show was all business, with a multitude of new product releases and alliances announced. While no one human could cover everything in such a mammoth show, a key trends is interoperability, which may be moving a little past the hype. Every vendor I spoke with described how they were integrating their product with everyone else's system. No one wants to be an "island" of information any more.

Two other important trends are automation of high acuity areas like the …

A new study examines the way physicians use clinical decision support systems, looking at the factors which cause them to ignore system alarms and prompts. The research, which appears in BioMedCentral and Medical Informatics, concludes that most doctors welcome the technology, albeit with some reservations. About 80 percent, however, say they tend to ignore alarms when they are in a hurry.

- see this article …

> Electronic medical records will change the way the US healthcare system works by revolutionizing the flow of information, argues Philip Longman. That makes medical privacy the "new threshold issue in American healthcare." Article

> New CEO Ronald Williams takes over the helm at Aetna today. …

HIMSS appears to be getting bigger and bigger. There are 23,500 people here and over 800 exhibitors, but segregation is the watchword. The big guys are downstairs in the main exhibit hall, while the smaller companies are in an upstairs gulag. Cerner has perhaps the most interesting approach, taking a huge space in the middle of the hall, but featuring its clients rather than itself. Several other big companies are hosting smaller ones, with Microsoft devoting seemingly all its space to …

> University of California Irvine Medical Center is expected to release an internal report on widespread problems at the hospital this week. Article

> An FDA panel created last year in response to the outcry over the safety of prescription drugs will meet privately. The Drug Safety Oversight Board should meet publicly to ensure public confidence, critics said …