By Peggy Salvatore
The Health Information Management System Society is hosting its 15th annual convention this week. It is probably one of its most important, too. Health IT has morphed from an emphasis on getting functional patient record systems into the provider environment to the promise of 24/7 patient connectivity. Imagine the data! Imagine the opportunities! As if to underline the importance of this watershed moment, the event attracted a record 40,000+ people to Chicago this year.
If, like me, you aren’t there but hate to miss it, HIMSS is providing online access to certain sessions for a mere $49. For a health IT geek, that’s a bargain. I won’t be able to take advantage of it because I will be out of my office teaching most of this week. But here’s the link to grab a few sessions and take part in a live, moderated chat.
For a much-digested version of the highlights, you can also follow the fun online. Lots of people are posting from the event in Chicago.
HIMSS15 attendees are all over the Twitterverse and the Blogosphere. Here’s a quick guide to a few of my prolific favorites:
@HIMSS – the official Twitter site for the organization, of course
#HIMSS15 – the event hashtag
@HITECHanswers – a great resource
@techguy – John Lynn blogs every weekday, all year round, come rain, come shine, and he talks to everybody all year round, come rain, come shine.
John Lynn’s blog link
@Farzad_MD – former ONC HIT Chief Farzad Mostashari is the center of excitement
@MandiBPro – Mandi Bishop, who is a prolific health IT poster with lots of great tweets and is apparently trying to take a selfie with all 40,000 attendees
There are 10s of thousands more people tweeting and probably at least a thousand blogging and writing articles. If you start with this list and follow the retweets, you’ll find everybody else.
Have a great week at Virtual HIMSS15!
