Prof. Jim Warren, Chair in Health Informatics at the University of Auckland has been blogging from HIMSS 09 in Chicago:
It’s the world’s largest health software exhibit; and it looks it, too. More than once I was simply lost in the acres of vendor booths, and equally felt a surge of vertigo when looking out over the forest of vendor banners – Siemens, Perot Systems, Allscripts, etc., etc., etc. Somehow the vertigo seems to increase after they start giving away drinks around 4.30pm.
Nonetheless, the opportunity for hours of back-to-back demos, all in one spot, is just wonder and so informative. Before talking about personal highlights from the demos, I might mention a couple of the keynote presentations.
If you want technical presentations that take you to the leading edge of methods of information in medicine, go to the AMIA Annual Symposium, not HIMSS. For glitz and big names in the plenaries, however, HIMSS has AMIA beat to the nth degree.
