Chicago HIMSS Conference Day 2, April 5, 2009

So, the conference actually started on Saturday but the parts of it that happened yesterday were more about continuing education credits and society awards banquets.  Since I haven’t belonged to the society that long, I knew I didn’t need to be in for Saturday.  But, there were some sessions I wanted to attend on Sunday, so here I am.

Really horrible choice for a hotel, if I do say so myself.  I won’t have dial tone on the room phone the remainder of my stay I discovered.  They don’t know what is wrong or how to resolve it.  Not a big deal, but it is slightly annoying because I like having the land line as a backup for folks to reach me.  Turns out my room faces the El.  ARGH!  That means that every 30 or 40 minutes a train comes by going one or the other direction.  It managed to wake me up more than once overnight.  I don’t sleep well in hotels on the first night anyway and this did nothing to help out.  The water pressure is the pits in the shower, and there’s a very heavy chlorine smell to the water in the shower.  Have I really become that much of an elitist?  I can remember staying in hotels or motels FAR worse than this and never batting an eye.  Now, I can’t even imagine.

The conference sessions were mixed.  The first one I went to was discussing the NHIN, which is the government based framework for the secure exchange of patient data across the country.  Very early still in terms of large adoption.  Still, it presents an interesting option in that it should allow smaller practices to embrace the Electronic Health Record without bearing significant amounts of costs associated with building out a framework and then connecting their framework to others.

The next session was not as good.  It was supposed to be about adopting Electronic Health Records, but it wound up being a generic discussion of process decomposition and redesign as you worked toward a goal of Electronic Health Records.  Not to slight the speaker, she was very good, but it was old information and didn’t really in my mind cover the topic at hand.

The last session of the day was the Keynote Address from Dennis Quaid.  Now, I had no real idea what to expect from it, but I wanted to hear what he had to say.  Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that recently his twins had received overdoses of heparin in the hospital and so his entire discussion centered around how IT in Healthcare should facilitate greater safety in patient care.  An important subject, but it really came across to me more as whining than delivering valuable information.  Probably just my opinion.

I got back to the room early since there were no afternoon sessions I was really interested in.  I took this opportunity to go to the bar and have some Jameson and club sodas.  I really had time to kill and while I was there got my call from Brian that we’d be going to dinner around 6.  Good timing for me.

We went to a Polish restaurant.  It isn’t very different from German, other than to say it is a bit heavier.  I tried some of the spread they brought with the bread and it literally tasted like what my mom gets out of that jar on her stove to add into green beans, etc.  It was some sort of lard or animal fat with bits of bacon in it!  Oh my God!  I could have hurled.  Oh well, I tried it.  Overall, dinner was a positive experience though, so I won’t complain.

Got back to the room and the snowstorm had picked up.  Yes, that’s right, it is snowing here in April.  I should have known better.  And, of course, now not only did the hotel not have a working phone in my room, but they are on satellite and the storm was blocking reception.  So, I had no TV as well!  I drifted off to sleep quite annoyed by my hotel choice for this trip.

I miss Colleen.  I spoke to her briefly, and sort of summarized the sessions from the day.  I didn’t tell her about the bacon grease spread though.  She’d likely have hurled just hearing about it!  It was good to hear her voice though.  Makes me feel better that she’s at least not too frazzled.

Cheers!