Today is my first day back from a week long conference in Orlando. It was the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, a group I’ve heard about for years, but have never had any real contact/experience with them. This year my boss approved me and one other co-worker to attend the 5 day conference and I’m so glad we did.

The conference was made up mostly of hour-long education sessions, complimented by plenty of time to explore the 850+ exhibitors, which was quite amazing. A few of the keynote speakers were Bill Frist, Tennessee’s own former Senate Majority Leader, Steve Case, Chairman and CEO of Revolution Health, Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, and Steven D. Levitt, author of FREAKONOMICS. Quite a good group of speakers. Their content was highly applicable to the current healthcare situation in the US and I learned a lot about where we stand as a country, which was a little frightening.

The education sessions were only an hour long and ranged from topics of EMR to Process Improvement to IT infrastructure. So many were going on at once, we only had the chance to see a fraction of the sessions. I generally picked the ones relating to EMRs and was quickly reminded how different Vanderbilt is as far as EMRs go. Its shocking to find out that there are still large health organizations that are just now starting their EMR adventure. Not to mention the fact that Vanderbilt is one of the very, very few institutions that uses a home-grown system. That made it difficult to relate to a bit of the content, but it was still helpful nonetheless.

On top of the daily activities, we had evening events every night sponsored by different vendors/suppliers, which meant we got to go to SeaWorld, Universal Studios, and some of the best restaurants in the city. It was a good way to meet the companies with whom we work and also get to know other customers.

I could really go into some detail about the conference, but since this is my first day back at work, I should probably save the details for later!

I will just mention that we had a great time in Orlando. The weather was nice the first few days, but then it stormed and got pretty cold for the last two days. We stayed in a nice condo with plenty of room for the two of us and had the freedom of a rental car, which wasn’t used too much but still nice to have. I wish we’d had a little more time for site-seeing, but we were there for work after all!