What’s the word at HIMSS13?

NEW ORLEANS—With ICD-10, Meaningful Use and all the developments in mobile health and analytics, CIOs and others working in health IT have a lot on their plate this year as the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference gets underway.

Here’s what a few attendees consider to be the most important issues or trends in health IT today:

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Big data and health information exchanges, because as the government mandates to collect all these data points we’re going to be able to parse immensely large data sets to reveal things that we heretofore have not been able to analyze.

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I think for us right now what we’re really focusing on is patient engagement and involving patients more fully in their healthcare.

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The one that’s not being discussed is the need for a national patient identifier. All this interoperability won’t work without having a way to make sure when we transfer a patient from one system to another system that it ties it to the right person.