HIMSS13 will provide a variety of opportunities for attendees. Networking (and perhaps commiserating) with fellow healthcare executives will be important. Checking out vendors’ latest and greatest products will be worthwhile. They may even have time to grab some fresh New Orleans Hornets gear.
Of course, everyone has certain goals for this conference that may hold as many as 30,000 people heading into it. So, what are some of those goals? HealthITSecurity.com had a chance to speak with a few C-level healthcare executives to learn what they’re most interested in and what they’re looking to get out of HIMSS13.
Nance Shatzkin, CIO of the Bronx RHIO and President of Shatzkin Systems
Shatzkin isn’t going this year as her daughter Keela Rose Shatzkin is going instead. But Nance Shatzkin still has a few items she wants her daughter to hone in on while she’s there:
You have to have a focus heading into the conference or you’re going to get lost while you’re there. We’re focusing on patient identity and matching software and we’re also interested in new health information exchange (HIE) initiatives – CCDs and analytics databases. And we’re always looking for educational opportunities.
Ronald J. Fuschillo, Vice President and CIO of Englewood Hospital and Medical Center
This will be different for everyone, but for me personally it’s a good opportunity to meet with fellow CIOs and share ideas and talk about collaboration opportunities.
Second is the vendor booths and some of their initiatives with security (previously discussed) that we have in other silos for this year and next year. We’re focusing on those areas and are always interested in seeing what the vendors have to offer and hoping to find that magic wand that does more than we were hoping for. To see the vendors side by side because you may see some things out there that you may have overlooked. Or there may have been some products you’ve seen in the past that may not have been mature enough. Third would be, if there’s time, to get to some of the sessions.
David Sheidlower, CISO of Health Quest Systems
Sheidlower won’t be attending but spoke to what CISOs may be looking for at the show:
I think the general thing that healthcare CISO’s are looking for right now is how to secure messaging (there are products but they each have limits and there is no best of breed yet), how is the industry responding to the increased pressure to encrypt that is in the new HIPAA final rule, and how much help is the industry providing for safeguarding data (AD integration, enhanced logging, enhanced role based access control, etc.) On the horizon, I would say the issue bubbling just under the surface is this: Is the Health Care industry as a whole finally ready to embrace governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) as a discipline? There are positive signs of it.