Medical Device Daily Executive Editor

ORLANDO, Florida — HIMSS (the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society; Chicago) rocks! Literally.

On Sunday evening before the conference's official opening of this year's HIMSS conference, an Oscar-themed party, drinks, a band, dancing. Then, to kick off Monday morning's keynote address, a rock and roll band performing – guitars, bongos (though does a real rock band have a saxophone?), the huge audience clapping along – big visuals, a line of flag twirlers and the keynoter a sort of medical rock star, former U.S. senator and practicing cardiovascular surgeon Bill Frist.

Well, maybe not exactly rock-concert atmosphere, but very much an exuberant "Geek squad" pep rally, with John Wade, chair of the HIMSS board and VP and CIO of St. Luke's Hospital of Kansas City, delivering an upbeat call to action, declaiming: "This is our time!"

And the conference is projecting this message this week to an increasingly large and enthusiastic group of IT professionals.

At conference opening, HIMSS reported 26,300 registered attendees and on pace to sign on perhaps as many as 28,000, including 1,600 "senior" chief information officers, this number about 20% more than the previous year. And the exhibition hall features 905 companies, compared to 862 the previous year.

Wade's primary call to action, delivered in the very large, very packed main hall at the Orange County Convention Center was that a variety of healthcare information technology (HIT) initiatives have been launched, but they now need to be speeded up to reach the goals set.

Wade defined those major goals as improving patient quality and safety, and then asked the key strategic question: "How do we get the others to pick up the pace?"

Key to this large goal, Wade said, was the establishment of a national electronic medical record (EMR), and while acknowledging the dilatory progress in reaching this goal, he donned a Boston Red Sox cap and referenced the long history of Red Sox frustration — but two recent World Series victories.

And he declared: "No challenge is insurmountable."

He went on to identify the broadly referenced report of 98,000 deaths yearly due to medical errors, by the Institute of Medicine (Washington), as an important turning point for HIT, because it "quantified for the first time" those errors and the need to reduce them, with HIT now "impacting the whole issue of patient safety and quality."

He then pointed to key milestones in this effort: 35 million e-prescriptions written this past year – but still only 2% of all prescriptions written – and the hoped-for achievement of a broad-based "ambulatory EMR technology" in place by 2014.

And he said the broad achievement of seamless electronic interoperability in U.S. healthcare would "help your organization, help your patients and, in the end, help your country."

He then introduced Frist, who provided underlining of this message, along the way noting that he was the only practicing physician since 1928 to be elected to Congress – an unstated hint, perhaps, concerning the need for more in that role, and certainly the need for more healthcare clinicians involved in the political arena. "Politics matters," he said.

With emphasis on the need for broad sharing of clinical information concerning medical practice outcomes, Frist said that the primary goal should be to make "the affordable resources available to every American out there today."

He went on to give a largely bipartisan view of the current political landscape, but offered the view that the government should be the "enabler" of U.S. healthcare, not its primary provider.

Concerning the prospects for U.S. healthcare reform, Frist projected little real change in the near term, given the large differences between Democrats and Republicans concerning their "vision" of what healthcare should be.

Democrats, he said, tend to be more dissatisfied with U.S. healthcare and expect coverage by the government. Republicans are "less dissatisfied," he said, and tend to emphasize the need for cost reduction, with "coverage" second and an emphasis on "marketplace solutions."

And Frist said the positions on healthcare by the presidential candidates would become even clearer when they move from speaking to the electorate of the primaries to taking their different approaches to the general population.

True to what his audience undoubtedly wanted to hear, Frist emphasized the need for HIT to enable the broad dissemination of information required to improve healthcare value.

HIT, he said, is key to impacting what he described as 50% of the factors that determine a person's health: individual behavior, 40%, and healthcare services, 10%; the other 50% relatively fixed and made up of genetics (30%), socio/economic status (15%) and environmental exposure (5%).

Against his upbeat call to continuous HIT action, however, Frist painted a stark and depressing picture: costs of healthcare increasing yearly at a rate of 5 1/2% vs. a GDP increasing yearly at a rate of 3%.

And he said that the current rate of government entitlements will bankrupt Medicare by 2020, Social Security by about 2040.

"We've over-promised and will be punishing the next generation," he said, a situation that he termed "immoral."

But echoing Wade's call to action, Frist told attendees that what they do to bring about the seamless integration and dissemination of healthcare information could play a large part in solving these problems, and saying, "Now is the time."