It's back to Las Vegas for HIMSS16 in a bit more than a week, which begs the question, what's going to be theme of this year's show? There's typically very little data to apply to questions like that, until now.

Drew Ivan, Healthcare Solutions Strategist with Orion Health, wrote a post on LinkedIn on HIMSS16 trends - with data! There's a great diagram that compares the number of presentations under educational session categories have changed between 2015 and 2016. As an example, here are the top 5:

  1. Care Coordination and Population Health - up substantially over last year
  2. Process Improvement, Workflow, and Change Management - also up substantially over last year
  3. Privacy and Security - up slightly
  4. Innovative Processes, Solutions and Emerging Technologies - up modestly over last year
  5. Leadership, Governance, and Strategic Planning - down from #1 in 2015 but still in the top 5

And here's some of Drew's analysis that's in another blog post reference in the LinkedIn post:

Care coordination and population health and process improvement, workflow and change management are tied for the most popular category, with 29 educational sessions focused on each.

...

Providers and payers alike are seeking information about how best to operationalize business processes and provide high quality care under new payment models, but it may be even more interesting to visit the Exhibition Hall to see what innovations vendors are bringing to the market to meet these needs.

Another topic related to changes in healthcare delivery is clinical informatics and clinician engagement, which is all about how new technologies, such as big data and precision medicine, can impact care decisions. The ability to make data-driven clinical decisions is one of the many dividends of widely adopted electronic health records. This is likely to be an important area for many years to come.

Not surprisingly - especially after Hollywood Presbyterian - data security also makes Drew's list of what will be hot at HIMSS16.

And despite the paucity of education sessions, he suspects that there might be an increase in wearable devices this year based on this category’s dominance at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. 

Frankly, trends at HIMSS annual conferences rarely penetrate my own focused objectives for any given year. This year I'm helping a client assess surveillance monitoring solutions, and doing research on mobile health and messaging middleware solutions. I also hope to swing by some MDDS, nurse call and RTLS booths.

One change this year is that I'm sharing my spreadsheet of exhibitors with readers. You can use this tool to identify interesting digital health exhibitors and organize your march across the exhibit floors. If you're interested, you can learn more here.

If you see me at HIMSS16, be sure to stop and say hello. I'd love to see you.

I can't wait to see Buck and Winnie again.