HIMSS22 theme Reimagine Health echoes healthcare's transformation since COVID-19

Hal Wolf, president and CEO of HIMSS

Photo courtesy of HIMSS

The healthcare industry has survived, adapted and innovated its way through two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year, the HIMSS22 Global Health Conference & Exhibition is echoing that transformation in its theme, Reimagine Health.  

"HIMSS looked at what has fundamentally changed," said CEO Hal Wolf. "When we think about Reimagine Health, it's creative, inspirational and transformational. There's not a single part of healthcare that's not been impacted by COVID-19. We're still establishing new normals."

As COVID-19 has been an accelerator to move healthcare beyond the encounter-based paradigm, Reimagine Health is "a call to action," Wolf said. 

It's getting away from reactive care to predictive health, for the individual and at the population health level.

"What drives that is information, predictive algorithms," Wolf said. "We're starting to use more back-end cloud-based services. Predicting modeling, that is what we're seeing today, and I think that will be a critical driver for the next five to 10 years."

This year's HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition will take place March 14 to 18 in Orlando, Florida, and online through HIMSS22 Digital. HIMSS is the parent company of Healthcare Finance News.

People in healthcare want to understand what's driving care, Wolf said.

"This fits perfectly into the vision of HIMSS and its 110,000 members," he said, "the need to learn and understand. The other area is addressing many of the inequities in healthcare."

In the last two years, HIMSS membership has grown more than 50%, adding 33,000 members, according to Wolf. This increase comes from North America and international locations.

People from around the globe will be participating in HIMSS22, including Volker Amelung, president of the German Managed Care Association, and Sylvia Thun, a professor at Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin, one of Europe's largest university hospitals. Thun does research in digital health, interoperability, bioinformatics and emergency medical care.

With Lisa Caplan, executive vice president of Technology and Innovation at HIMSS, the discussion will center on "Digital Maturity: Germany's Benchmark-Setting National Hospital Assessment."

"Germany is going through an extraordinary shift," Wolf said. "The EU is taking on meaningful use and funding EHRs."

The German government has done a survey of hospitals that have put in EMRs. They will be measured again in 2023. France is also adopting EMRs to the EMR EMRAN standard, Wolf said. The HIMSS Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) assesses EMR implementation for hospitals and health systems globally.

The HIMSS22 kickoff keynote speaker is Ben Sherwood, former co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of Disney ABC Television Group. He will talk about "Daring Greatly: Leading and Succeeding in the Age of Disruption."

The HIMSS global conference, usually held in the spring, was moved to August 2021 for HIMSS21 due to the pandemic. This year for HIMSS22, falling Omicron numbers are good news for in-person attendance, Wolf said. Safety protocols will be in place.

"It became clearer in the pandemic," Wolf said, "that each individual is a breath away from being a patient."

Twitter: @SusanJMorse
Email the writer: susan.morse@himssmedia.com