HIMSS Retrospective - Tale of a Prodigal Son

After serving stints with healthcare giants J&J and CR Bard, I’ve been to a handful of pretty cool healthcare conferences: AORN (the big nursing conference), RSNA (the big Radiology conference), ASHP (Pharmacists) and AAOS (Orthopedists) all come to mind.

I even attended HIMSS once - all the way back in 2011. And now looking back after being away for a few years there’s one thing that I’m certain of – a lot has changed.

Back in 2011, “interoperability” was a fancy word not many people knew the definition of. I’ll never forget asking a COO of a small community hospital in South Carolina how Meaningful Use would impact her rural, 50-bed hospital. Her answer: “what’s meaningful use?” Needless to say, CMS policy had yet to gain significant traction across many of the non-academic health systems at that point. The attestation period for MU Stage 1 had just been announced and interoperability was nothing more than a provocative conversation piece.

At the time, I was working for a progressive, Silicon Valley health tech company called Omnicell. Despite shipping some pretty cool software, we weren’t very excited about the new regulatory initiatives coming down the pipe. Soon those initiatives would be competing for IT budget dollars at hospital sites where we were entrenched.

And as budgets began to dry up, administrators began to freeze up. Unless IT projects were required as part of Meaningful Use, deploying new technologies became an afterthought. Hospital CIO’s opted to delay investments in innovative healthcare apps, stifling the growth of an emerging health tech ecosystem.

And with the fallout came my own personal departure from the healthcare market in exchange for a stint in B2B, with SaaS giant Salesforce (who ironically would later announce a partnership with Redox). It was pretty sad leaving healthcare – a space that I had come to love. But the time spent away has given me such a unique perspective that I am so incredibly thankful for now.

Coming full circle, I feel like a prodigal son returning home. But in coming back, one thing is clear. 5 years ago, the healthcare space and the broader B2B tech space were worlds apart in terms of innovation. More specifically, the types of software companies that were so prevalent in the B2B market just didn’t exist in healthcare 5 years ago. The stifling regulatory environment and limitations surrounding interoperability were two of the underlying culprits to blame.

But, the most apparent observation when comparing HIMSS 2016 to HIMSS 2011 is that healthcare and health tech leaders have closed the gap - and in more ways than one. Change is being demanded - by not only political influencers, but by patients, clinicians, developers and entrepreneurs. What was a faint cry 5 years ago is now a loud and unified voice. That’s what got me pumped up at HIMSS this year. And that’s what is so special about this period of time in medicine.

At Redox, we’re thrilled to play a small role in amplifying that voice- the call for interoperability. Our passion is to help drive patient care and the way we help is by enabling health systems to deploy innovative apps. These innovative apps, when brought to market, have an enormous impact on quality and cost of care. And because these apps are external to a hospital’s EHR, we work alongside the health system and the app provider to accelerate integration and deployment of the new technology.

Behind a small army of former Epic interface/implementation ninjas, we’ve built a robust integration platform using a managed service approach that allows our customers to seamlessly bring data from the EHR to web applications and back again.

If we missed you at HIMSS, connect with us today to chat more about interoperability!