Dr. Jayne Goes to HIMSS Digital – Thursday

Thursday is functionally the last day of HIMSS for many attendees, as they’re worn out from cocktail parties and walking the exhibit hall. By this point, I would typically be packing my suitcase and dropping it at the bell desk so I could pick it up on the way to the airport for my late evening flight. Historically I do an Exhibit Hall Crawl with one of my long-time HIMSS friends, as we see who is left standing at the end of the week and who has headed out early. This time I’ve been receiving photos of the mostly empty exhibit hall from people on the ground.

I decided to attend the “Encouraging Science of Happiness” keynote featuring Rainn Wilson, since it was one of the few in-person sessions that was to be live-streamed. Logging into HIMSS digital, there was no information on the session, but I remembered hearing it was going to be streamed through the Accelerate platform. After way too many clicks, I was able to access the session, which was to start at 8:30 a.m. Ten minutes into it, I was still watching people wander in and find seats, with no update from HIMSS about any delays other than a single instance where a voice said something about “Changemakers, take your seats, the program is about to start.” It’s not like they had a crush of people they had to fit into the room.

Things finally got going at 8:42, but instead of showing video of speaker Reid Oakes, we were treated to a static image, and then the slide deck moved onto the HIMSS Stage 7 award recipients. They finally cut to a speaker view, but then the same thing happened when the keynote speakers came out – we got the slide deck, but we never got to see the actual speakers again until nearly the end. I guess HIMSS couldn’t figure out how to do a split screen?

Still, it was a good presentation, and talked about some of the challenges of current times – specifically the challenge of loneliness (which several nations including Japan and the UK have appointed governmental ministers to address) which according to the speakers has the same negative health effects of smoking a pack of cigarettes each day. Despite being one of the most connected generations, 18- to 24-year-olds (even pre-COVID) report higher levels of loneliness than senior citizens. One of the main points of the speech was the idea that intentionally choosing joy is an act of rebellion – going against the status quo. There was a part where the audience wrote notes to people who had positively influenced them and some of them read their notes aloud. It would have been nice to see those interactions rather than just a static slide.

Great Tweet from Jan Oldenburg @janoldenburg yesterday, pondering how we will identify the potential impact of COVID-19 spread from HIMSS21. Everyone will be going back to their homes and their day-to-day lives, not necessarily knowing where or when they might have come into contact with someone who was positive. This makes determining if and when to test somewhat problematic, since CDC recommends that even if you’re vaccinated, as all HIMSS21 attendees are, that you test on day 3-5 if you’re exposed. Since HIMSS keeps touting its Accelerate platform and the meeting app, having a COVID-19 tool as part of it would have been cool – even my alma mater has one for its on-campus students.

Although I can’t provide medical advice since I don’t want to run afoul of any laws, I can tell you what my own plan was going to be for post-HIMSS symptom surveillance: stay mostly in one part of the house, avoid the rest of my household, and have a test four days after coming off the plane. If negative, it’s highly likely that the virus has been dodged.

From everyone who has corresponded with me, it sounded like the in-person conference still had value even though there were some 100% unstaffed booths today. People generally liked being able to conduct their business without having to navigate crowds and without having to rush from meeting to meeting, since some of the meetings had canceled. Vendor-side reps felt the conversations were high value and less rushed. We’ll have to see what things look like a few short months from now, when we (hopefully) gather in Orlando. Time to hit the end-of-summer sale rack for what will become my sassy spring sandals.

Will you be attending HIMSS22? Leave a comment or email me.

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