I flew out of Logan Airport in Boston at 5:30 a.m. last Monday, and was eager to head to sunny Orlando as a first time HIMSS attendee. The next three days were a whirlwind of innovation, shared ideas, and excitement about the future of health IT.

Let me tell you why I’m really excited to be attending my first HIMSS.

First and foremost is the evolution of healthcare IT. The strides we’ve made in the past few years have been phenomenal. Leading technology providers and app developers are now embracing healthcare IT and connecting new innovative technologies to leading EHR platforms, making HIMSS a great opportunity to see what the future holds.

Reaching 50 years is an outstanding achievement, and all of us at MEDITECH couldn’t be prouder. To celebrate this milestone, we’ve put together a video to give you a sense of who we are — a diverse group of innovators who share a personal investment in caring for others.

Over the past year, we’ve seen the term ‘gameplay’ popping up in more and more places. People seem to be quite taken with the notion that the logistics and patterns surrounding games and their rules can be applied to business, politics, and everyday obstacles. As I would discover at the 2018 MGMA Annual Conference, gameplay can tell us a lot about how to succeed in healthcare today.

Currently, one of the most important goals in the health IT industry is making data truly interoperable.

In pursuit of that goal, healthcare organizations are seeking ways to match patient data and locate records in a fragmented digital environment where technology and processes simply aren’t set up to allow efficient data exchange and access. On top of that, regulatory requirements are putting additional pressure on healthcare organizations to meet benchmarks and reporting mandates.

Think of where your hospital’s IT department was six years ago. Now, consider where it is today — and how you see it evolving in the future.

In the past six years, Halifax Health has undergone a total transformation in how we approach IT, from having experienced a number of challenges, to being named the Best Place to Work in IT in midsized organizations for three straight years by Computerworld.

Whether a hospital has 6 or 600 beds, clinicians require the right tools to provide quality patient care. If only it were that simple, right?

Procuring a modern EHR can be complex and costly, pulling on an organization’s resources from all angles — not to mention having to navigate numerous third party products in order to meet all their needs. For smaller healthcare organizations, this can become an especially daunting experience.

On Halloween, as I was waiting for MACRA's Quality Payment Program (QPP) Year 2 ruling to be finalized, I was pondering tricks and treats. Would practices find a full sized candy bar when the door opened or a toothbrush? As trick-or-treaters often find, the ruling was a little of both. For me, the trick is a ruling that came in at a hefty 1,653 pages: the treat, the 20+ page fact sheet and executive summary.

For the third year in a row, MEDITECH proudly hosted the CommonWell Health Alliance Annual General Meeting and Fall Summit last week at our Joanne Wood Conference Center in Foxborough, Massachusetts. The annual Member gathering provides a valuable opportunity to gather and reflect on the many achievements the Alliance and its members have attained throughout the year.

Recently, I was inspired by a HIStalk webinar, “3 Secrets to Leadership Success for Women in Healthcare IT,” hosted by two female executives of health IT companies, Liz Johnson and Nancy Ham. During the webinar, Ham and Johnson provided valuable advice to women who are interested in progressing in their careers to a leadership position, but who may experience unconscious or conscious gender bias.