About the author: Rand Ragusa is co-founder and SVP of Business Development of Better Day™ Health, which is transforming clinical documentation for providers. He recently attended the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Orlando.
Every year experts across healthcare converge for the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the most influential health IT conference in the world. The 2017 meeting was held in Orlando in February with more than 40,000 attendees, in an exhibit hall so vast it was impossible to see from one end to the other and an agenda that covered the gamut of issues in healthcare.
The Louisiana Chapter of HIMSS hosted a well-attended reception with the Alabama and Mississippi chapters on Sunday night at Copper Canyon Grill. Hot political topics at the event covered everything from the new Trump Administration upcoming changes to Obamacare, the letter from Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health Secretary Rebekah Gee, MD about the successful expansion of Medicaid, to the negative effects of healthcare budget cuts by the legislature.
This year Louisiana executives were well represented on the conference agenda. Jamie Martin, marketing and communications manager of the Baton Rouge-based Louisiana Healthcare Quality Forum and Nadine Robin, the former Health IT Program Director, led a session entitled: The Patient’s Perspective on Patient Engagement: Louisiana One Year Later. The Year One campaign results included patient feedback, about why some people will engage with health IT and why others will not – and the two shared best practices on creating and managing statewide IT programs.
At the Population Care Management Symposium, Cindy Munn, CEO at Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum, and Ann Kay Cefalu Logarbo, MD, CMO, UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Louisiana, offered attendees a sense of what it takes to achieve success in efforts to reduce unnecessary emergency department (ED) utilization and improve clinical outcomes, in a Medicaid population.
Former New Orleans Health Commissioner and Assistant Secretary of Health US Department of Health and Human Services Karen Desalvo, MD, MPH, MSc was one of seven women honored as inaugural recipients of HIMSS’s Most Influential Women in Health IT Awards selected from more than 140 nominations.
LA’s emerging health IT industry was well represented once again at HIMSS – including Dynamic Health IT, TRUE-See and Better Day™ Health. Dynamic Health IT, led by EHR certification guru Raychelle Fernandez, is a New Orleans-based health IT company providing innovative interoperability and EHR certification solutions – which their team showcased at the company’s booth again this year.
HIMSS 2018 will be held in Las Vegas March 5-9th. With thousands of companies exhibiting annually, HIMSS is the best place for digital health companies in Louisiana to connect with potential customer and partners.