This week is HIMSS 2019, and if you are in the healthcare field or a related field, be sure to pay special attention to coverage of this year’s conference.

What is HIMSS 2019?

HIMSS is the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, who has a conference annually.  Interestingly, HIMSS the organization is a non for profit organization focusing on driving the world of healthcare forwards.  The HIMSS 2019 conference boasts over 45,000 attendees from over 90 countries.  While many different regulations may exist in the healthcare area with attendees from over 90 countries, healthcare IT practitioners face some of the same issues, no matter where they are located.  The healthcare industry is unique in the sense that many healthcare organizations directly impact their customers’ lives, and a working IT environment can be the difference between life and death.

HIMSS 2019 Conference Tracks

As with many technology industry conference, the HIMSS 2019 conference divides its content into tracks.  While you will see many content areas common across most industry events, HIMSS also focuses on some additional healthcare industry content such as:
  • Clinical Informatics & Clinical Engagement
  • Clinically Integrated Supply Chain
  • Health Information Exchange, Interoperability, Data Integration
  • Telehealth
  • And more!
For a complete list of tracks and the content within each track at HIMMS 2019, be sure to take a look at the full tracks list and program here.

HIMSS 2019 Is a Must Attend for Healthcare IT Professionals

HIMSS 2019 is a must attend for healthcare IT professionals.  At other industry conferences, we do not often see a focus on healthcare.  HIMSS 2019 is the place for vendors to not only bring the information on what their technologies do, but how they can specifically enable the healthcare area.
Two hot areas for healthcare IT professionals are often how both patient and clinical trial data are handled.  We have all heard of HIPAA as consumers, but how healthcare IT organizations comply with the regulation is a whole new level of complexity on top of traditional data management.  Violating HIPPA regulations come with strict penalties for healthcare organizations, as well as the fact that sensitive patient data was exposed to unintended parties.
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Handling of clinical trial data is also a hot topic for healthcare IT practitioners since the FDA has such strict regulations around submission of this data.  In many pharmaceutical companies, clinical trial systems are some of the most important, since delay in submission of data can have serious consequences for both the healthcare company as well as the lives they are trying to save with the clinical trial.
There are strict regulations around both data areas that other IT practitioners simply do not have to deal with on a daily basis.  Add onto regulations the unique software needs of the healthcare industry, and things can get even more complicated.  Take the application EPIC for example, which requires certification between the software package and the vendors that want to be able to enable healthcare organizations to run the software application.

Getting HIMSS 2019 Highlights

If you are not able to attend HIMSS 2019, never fear, there are plenty of resources to help you stay up to date.  Besides staying up to date with the #HIMSS19 hashtag on social media, HIMSS also has HIMSS TV, where many of the key aspects of the conference are viewable online.  Past HIMSS sessions have been recorded and later available at the HIMSS learning center, so the HIMSS 2019 content should be showing up sometime after the conference.