This week we’ll be attending the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) mega-conference in Las Vegas, and we hope to see you there! If you’re not familiar with it, HIMSS attracts more than 45,000 attendees and 1,300 exhibitors to share the latest developments and thinking about health information and technology. This meeting is so big that there are webinars and on-site orientation programs for first-time attendees. We don’t see that at our typical scientific meetings!
One of the reasons we’re interested in this meeting is that precision medicine is steadily increasing its presence there. For example, the precision medicine forum midway through the conference features some top-notch speakers and important topics for the community.
Among the highest-profile talks at HIMSS are the “View from the Top” sessions. This year, we’re looking forward to several of these presentations. Seema Verma from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will talk about the deployment of health IT for patients at her agency, while Google VP Gregory Moore will speak about the role of machine learning and cloud computing in healthcare in the future. Jan Kimpen, Chief Medical Officer of Philips, and David Higginson, CIO of Phoenix Children’s Hospital, will offer a joint chat about shifting responsibilities for CIOs as health systems aim to improve their success rates.
Here at QIAGEN’s bioinformatics group, we think a lot about the role of IT in healthcare. If you haven’t read it already, check out this forward-looking MLO column from our Chief Technology Officer, Ramon Felciano. “We will not fully embrace the era of genomic medicine without significant improvements to the computational infrastructure and policies that govern healthcare data,” he writes. “I believe that if we join forces and push for change, we can usher in a new era of clinical testing and significantly improved healthcare for patients around the world.”