Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/27/23

I’m headed to several conferences over the next two months. I spent some time this weekend going through the agendas and looking at the details to identify specific sessions I’d like to attend.

Smaller conferences tend to have smaller agendas, so it was fairly easy to determine what I planned to attend at the first of the series, which is the American Telemedicine Association Annual Conference & Expo in San Antonio. Given the frigid weather across most of the US, I have to say I’m looking forward to the San Antonio weather as much as I’m looking forward to any of the sessions. The topics I’m excited about most include remote monitoring, legal issues, and health equity.

Regarding the latter, telehealth holds huge promise, but there is still significant concern that large groups of patients are being left behind due to technology and connectivity issues. My focus is more on health literacy and the barriers it creates as far as care delivery, so it will be interesting to see what the speakers have to say.

The agenda for the CHIME/ViVE mashup was a little more complicated to navigate since it has a lot of sessions that run concurrently across a half dozen different tracks, along with a number of CHIME-only sessions and events. I found a fair amount of overlap in the concepts behind the ViVE tracks and ended up having to really look at the session descriptions versus being able to use the tracks or titles to help thin out the options. I also looked at the speakers and will be making sure to hit sessions with speakers from organizations that are constantly in the news, such as Amazon Clinic and Teladoc.

I didn’t attend ViVE last year, but the way it’s set up seems similar to HLTH. Many of the sessions are focused around experts discussing their opinions. Although those can be interesting, for those of us who have been heavily into evidence-based medicine, we know that when assessing the strength of a recommendation based on a body of evidence, expert opinion is the weakest. When attending those kinds of sessions, I often find myself thinking, “that’s great, but the proof will be in the proverbial pudding,” so I anticipate having that feeling often during the conference.

If you’re going for talks that hit higher up the evidence-based scale, HIMSS is the place to be, at least as far as its concurrent education sessions are concerned. I’ve made fun of HIMSS in the past because the submission timeline for sessions is so far ahead of the conference that material can become stale. However, that significant lead time is useful when you’re performing an advance review of what is going to be presented and assessing it for things like level of evidence and commercial bias. For those sessions where continuing medical education or other credits will be offered, they must include designated learning objectives, along with disclosures of any financial relationships that might be related to the content of the presentations.

Although some of the HIMSS sessions I’ve been to have been dry, they’re usually well put together and the presenters are happy to correspond with you afterwards if you want to dig into their topics. Of course, several of the sessions I’d like to attend are on top of each other, which is a shame. In the past, I’ve found the recorded sessions to be variable in quality, and if I remember correctly, the lower-cost pass I bought for this year doesn’t include access to the recordings. 

Some of the presentations I’m looking forward to at HIMSS cover health equity, standards and interoperability, using automated care programs to improve clinical outcomes, and integrating virtual care with other healthcare delivery options. I’m doing some volunteer work with underserved populations, so I’m particularly interested in one of the sessions on street medicine and delivering care to the homeless. I’ve worked previously with one of the organizations that is presenting and I’m excited to see how their program has grown in the intervening years. It sounds like they’ve added a lot of technology tools to their approach while they still manage to maintain the focus on whole-person care.

It’s always fun to see where people have ended up in this industry, It feels like we were so green trying to do some of these technology initiatives back in the pre-Meaningful Use days. Some of my favorite clinical informaticists have crossed the 20-year mark in the business, so I’m looking forward to catching up with them in any downtime we can find.

Of course, one of the most fun parts of conference season for the HIStalk team is making the rounds at vendor events and reporting on the overall buzz. In the post-COVID era, those vendor events have been fewer in number and lower in key than when healthcare IT was in its more glamorous phases. That’s to be expected given the economy and the fact that marketing folks know that throwing a big bash with a lot of random attendees who don’t even have decision-making authority isn’t likely the best way to spend their cash. Still, if you’re throwing a blowout event where general attendees can register, feel free to send invites our way and we’ll consider anonymously dropping by.

As long as the weather holds, Chicago is one of my favorite cities for HIMSS because it’s easy to get around and has plenty of non-conference activities going on, unlike Orlando, where everything is mostly concentrated in that one section of International Drive. Unlike Las Vegas, you don’t have to walk through a smoky casino to get to where the action is, so that’s a plus.

Several people have told me that Nashville has turned into a fun conference location, although I haven’t been there since one meeting in 2008 that was held entirely at the Gaylord Opryland Resort. I’m looking forward to seeing what it has to offer and will be happy to have the opportunity to catch up with one of my favorite people in her hometown. It’s always good to have a friend who knows where the real fun is to be had and how to avoid the tourist traps and overhyped restaurants and bars.

If you’re taking part in upcoming conferences, what are you looking forward to the most? Leave a comment or email me.

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