HIMSS18 Las Vegas - What's your biggest takeaway?

The mother of all healthcare conferences, HIMSS Annual, went down last week at the Venetian in Las Vegas. At least 40,000 people descended upon the Sands Expo Center to network, learn and probably do a bit of gambling. While there, we caught up with Paubox customers and partners on their biggest takeaways from HIMSS18. Here are the transcripts of our conversations.

Hoala Greevy: Howzit! This is Hoala Greevy, I'm here again with Jonathan Bush, we're at HIMSS18 in Las Vegas. I last saw Jonathan during JPM week in January in San Francisco. I got one question for you Jonathan, what's your biggest takeaway for HIMSS18?

Jonathan Bush: I just got here!

Hoala Greevy: Yeah me too!

Jonathan Bush: My biggest takeaway is no different than last year.

Hoala Greevy: You can say the same thing for 10 years and still be considered a genius in healthcare. Did I get that right?

Jonathan Bush: And here's data point number one!

Aadli Abdul-Kareem: My biggest takeaway is actually going down to the Interoperability Showcase and seeing how much they’re promoting system integration and interoperability across applications. It looks like now everything from having a data center infrastructure that’s HIPAA-secured and ensuring that within that data center infrastructure, there’s tools that developers can leverage to integrate with EHR systems, more easily consume laboratory and share laboratory information, even down to consent. Like having behavioral health be a very huge topic in tackling “how do I drive consent-driven transactions in compliance with behavioral health?” It’s been pretty amazing. So that’s my biggest takeaway: True interoperability is finally being addressed the way it needs to be.

Chris Cruttenden: It seems to be a lot of hype about AI and blockchain. The takeaway on blockchain is it is not ready for primetime, at least in healthcare. It is far, far, far from ready. The AI stuff was extremely interesting and I think it’s going to create some efficiencies, especially in specialty care- radiology, dermatology, anything in a visual aspect where you can, retinopathy, where you can basically look at the images and have it learn which is a bad image versus a good image.

Santosh Mohan: There are a lot of exciting things. The the show floor is exciting. For me personally, the most exciting thing is that there's so many more startups here than there ever were. This is no longer just the playground for the big enterprise software people. So that is amazing. Also, the the number of health systems that are here wanting to work with startups and wanting to work with them by any and all means possible, so not just sort of driving pilots. I think they recognize that the pilot model is just not working really great unless there's a strong discipline to it. But also embracing App Stores, you know like our marketplace, you guys are on the marketplace. Embracing those models to really you know, also I think recognizing that they cut down the RFP times, they cut down the upfront integration costs, and for the startups too, I mean I you know you get saved on so much of upfront energy that you have to put working through the number of channels that you will, if you're going directly to a health system. So I think this type of new models, not just ours, maybe even Allscrips and Epic and Cerner, everybody has a model now. The willingness to recognize that and work through that, I think that to me is just very exciting.