Two years after HIMSS became COVID’s first trade show casualty, healthcare’s leading IT conference returned to Orlando with a very post-COVID vibe and a surge in imaging activity.
Hope you had a blast if you made it to HIMSS, and here’s some highlights in case you didn’t:
The HIMSS Crowd – Unlike the Delta-impacted HIMSS 2021 conference, this year’s event boasted a full exhibitor list and reportedly solid health IT leadership attendance. However, exhibitor staff often appeared to outnumber potential customers on the show floor, prompting conversations about whether HIMSS is evolving into a B2B event and causing some vendors to question where imaging sits on IT executives’ list of priorities.
The Mixed Cloud – PACS and enterprise imaging vendors continued to ramp up their cloud capabilities and cloud leadership messaging, with nearly everyone agreeing that the future will bring far more cloud adoption. It was also clear that many radiology practices and hospital systems (and even some PACS vendors) are still taking it slow on their path towards the cloud.
AI in the Aisles – Only a handful of imaging AI companies had booths this year, but it wasn’t hard to find folks from AI startups walking the show floor or in meeting rooms. That’s actually consistent with previous HIMSS conferences, and it makes a lot of sense given AI startups’ limited budgets and the low count of radiology leaders at the show.
AI in the Enterprise – Although we didn’t hear much about all those PACS-based AI platforms / marketplaces that were announced several years ago, AI was positioned at the center of quite a few PACS vendors’ future diagnostic workflow strategies. These strategies still largely focused on integrating third-party AI tools, but several major enterprise imaging players (e.g. Canon, Fujifilm, Siemens) also forecasted a greater future role for their own homegrown AI tools.
The Productivity Press – With imaging growing in volume / complexity at a much faster rate than imaging teams’ own headcounts / capabilities, just about every product message focused on improving productivity and efficiency. HIMSS 2022 saw imaging vendors address this in a wide variety of ways, including remote modality operation, ultrasound AI automation, automated scanner setup, and hanging protocol standardizing (to name a few).
Expanding Ologies – HIMSS also revealed more multi-ology progress as enterprise imaging players better connected their solutions, added new ology-expanding partnerships, and integrated their acquired companies. That said, it seems like the majority of “enterprise” imaging engagements are still limited to radiology, or at least starting there.
Looking Beyond Imaging – A walk around the show floor suggests that healthcare tech is evolving at a much faster pace outside of imaging, with major adoption and technology advances in telemedicine, patient monitoring, at-home and hybrid care, and patient engagement. Although most of these solutions have little to do with radiology right now, these efforts could change how and where many patients get their care, which would have an impact on nearly all specialties. By the way, we have an excellent newsletter about this space for those looking to keep up with these trends.
The Takeaway
After one year of digital conferences and another year of minimally-attended hybrid events, the bar has been set pretty low for 2022 trade shows. That said, HIMSS had everything that you would expect from a successful post-COVID trade show (plenty of vendors, exciting tech, strong attendance, good vibes), which is a good sign for future events as long as the pandemic cooperates.
Although HIMSS 2022 didn’t necessarily reveal any major focus changes for imaging IT, it did showcase some solid progress advancing the major imaging trends that we’ve seen over the last few years (cloud, AI, productivity, enterprise-expansion), and we’re excited to see what else this year has in store.
