Robert Fromberg
Editor-in-Chief, HFMA
I left the HIMSS conference yesterday--a little earlier than 10,000 or 20,000 of the other attendees--but it's never that clean of a break. The airplane is a time to catch up on all the pieces of paper you pick up at a conference like this. I was reading the magazine Healthcare Informatics, which included a funny opinion piece about the HIMSS conference by Dave Garets and John Glaser, two of the healthcare IT industry's shining lights. (By the way, Glaser writes regularly for hfm magazine, including this month's cover story.) They made a series of what they called (with tongue in cheek, I should emphasize) "amazing predictions" about the conference. For example, they preducted that there will be many talks about the healthcare IT industry being on the cusp of a revolution and that vendors will tout their "interoperability" and that RHIOs (regional health information organizations) would be held out as the next great hope for connectivity...the punch line being, of course, that similar claims--in similarly idealistic tones--are part of every year's conference.
Garets and Glaser certainly were correct. Their amazing predictions came true. But I have to ask, What's wrong with that? What's wrong with one component of an annual conference being an annual dose of idealism?
Many of us at HFMA are getting ready for HFMA's annual conference--the Annual National Institute. I know a thing or two about the content, and I don't think I'm giving away any secrets to say that our conference, also, will have a dose of idealism.
