Connecting tech and human stories at HIMSS24
If you want to play a pivotal role in the future of healthcare, the annual HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) conference is a good place to explore themes, trends, and stories shaping where healthcare is headed.
As I made my way through the exhibit hall, it quickly became clear that applications with ambient AI automating administrative tasks in the background stole the show, and in many of the keynotes, conversations about cybersecurity have intensified since the Change Healthcare cyberattack last month. But these weren’t the only stories being told.
While I'm not the typical attendee of HIMSS, as a health tech marketing consultant, I could see myself in the stories being told in the session, Views From The Top: Celebrating Our Passion and Our Purpose: Caring for Others in the Time of Turbulence, and I could recognize many of my neighbors in the experiences shared during the session, Social Determinants of Health Information Exchange Toolkit: Overview and Implementation Experience. This got me wondering, whose stories are exhibitors telling at HIMSS?
Every exhibit I visited seemingly had the latest technology, whether it allowed clinicians to save time with administrative tasks; to reduce alarm fatigue and enable standardized care; to more accurately and quickly diagnose patients; or simply to make their jobs in service of patients easier by enabling what most patients and their providers want, to have a real, (mostly) face-to-face conversation about a patient’s health. While all of this is vital to support clinicians, what could it mean for the average person? How are health tech providers expanding access to care to make sure no one is left behind?
Harnessing the latest technology means making sure that not only the technologies, but the people acquiring and operating them, are able to work together seamlessly to improve patient care and access to it.
That’s where I found the biggest gap between what I saw and heard in the Exhibit Hall and what I experienced in the keynote and educational sessions I attended. The stories and features in the Exhibit Hall were focused on technology. The stories in keynote and other presentations were focused on health equity and improving access to care. Bridging the gap between what we show and what we tell, between the tech benefits and the human benefits, between the individual and the universal, that’s when stories become powerful.
Three areas where I saw this gap being addressed:
While Epic and Cerner still rule the EHR roost, there are new players, such as Altera Digital Health, bringing tech equity to rural, critical access, and community hospitals through cloud-based EHR and SaaS solutions that forgo big investments on premises. These solutions open opportunities to better serve patients, like facilitating broader and more diverse access to decentralized clinical trials.
Innovations in health tech and steady progress with interoperability are driving partnerships that enable access to care through data sharing. These partnerships, such as the Community Information Exchange in San Diego, CA, provide real-time solutions to community healthcare providers to address social drivers of health, like access to safe and affordable housing, nutritious food, transportation services, and childcare. These innovations are also enabling longitudinal health tracking of patients who rely on social safety nets for their healthcare.
AI can serve many purposes, but it is imperative for AI to serve patients, not only providers, to make their lives easier by streamlining access to care and making the overall experience of healthcare simpler and more enjoyable. Those responsible for digital transformation and their counterparts at large health systems in the US, such as Intermountain Health in the Intermountain West, and globally, such as Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, South Korea, are making this a priority as they implement AI solutions.
I gravitated towards these sessions and those exhibits because at Nimble Works, we’re problem solvers at heart; we take a tech-forward and empathic approach to strategy and storytelling that allows readers to see themselves in the solution.
Now that I’m back, it’s time to get working! I can’t wait to share what I’ve learned with the team and help our clients tell their own access to care and tech equity stories.
Until we meet again in Vegas, in 2025, that’s a wrap on HIMSS!