HIMSS
hype

June 13, 2019 -- At the HIMSS Innovation Conference and Showcase in San Jose today, one of the speakers was Graham Grieve, called the father of FHIR (about which I have written before).

Electronic Health Records are a young, immature technology. Often, clinicians hate them; technology should reduce workloads but has the opposite effect. As the technology matures, this and other problems will be solved. What will that solution look like?

It's been predicted that the EHRs will eventually be relegated to data stores. They will evolve into backends that users won't experience directly. The parts that users will see will be apps, GUIs, and fine-tuned solutions created by third parties such as Nurse Tech.

What will it take to make this happen? At today's conference, we're told, the answer is APIs. And the API of choice in healthcare is FHIR. Good marketing, Mr. Grieve.

But not good talking. He emitted a stream of marketing buzzwords and we're-smarter-than-everybody-else cheerleading. Not much tech in the talk. This is what I'm learning to expect at HIMSS events: hype is the key to success. Thanks but no thanks.

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