It’s time again for the gigantic (50,000 people) HIMSS trade show – the Health Information Management Systems Society, in Las Vegas this year. These new SPM slides (on Slideshare) will be shown in the Consumer Engagement zone, summarizing our two surveys on what patients want:

The following is an editorial – my opinion, not a resolution passed by the board :-)

I have a love-hate relationship with HIMSS: really good people like SPM member @JohnSharp do things like running the HIMSS consumer center, and our member Keith Boone @Motorcycle_Guy advocate heavily for data portability, but the event itself has no use for patient voices – the vast majority of HIMSS membership and leadership don’t much give a rat’s patoot about what I call “the ultimate stakeholder” (patients) so they have no budget to support patients being present, while meanwhile spending $100,000 for big-draw keynote speakers like George W. Bush or (this year) Peyton Manning. Great guy, but health IT?  Nope, just a big draw. This conference is a big business – one that’s not focused on the people (patients) who have the problem for which the industry exists. This is the core mechanism by which the industry’s products pretty much suck, from a consumer perspective. (And from the clinician’s perspective – very few practicing clinicians attend. HIMSS is focused on the people who buy, sell, and operate the computers, not on the people who use them. It shows.)

But SPM fights on! One of the core dysfunctional beliefs in healthcare (including the HIMSS world) is that “patients don’t want their data.” Well, we do, and your Society continues to produce evidence, in these slides. Onward!

The original posts about these surveys:

• 2015: New S4PM Survey Shows People Want to Collaborate with Their Doctors and Co-Produce Their Clinical Data
• 2014: SPM survey in Times Square: “Americans believe their medical data should be shared with their providers”