Last week I attended the annual HIMSS conference in Chicago. It was an exceptional event with world class speakers, the latest in HIT products and services and great networking opportunities.

While there, I met with executives at numerous Healthcare IT companies. Below are specific companies I met with that were doing some very unique and innovative things that I felt were noteworthy:

HEALARIUM

Mobile platform designed to help patients follow their customized care plan. Healarium has 15 ready-to-use condition based care plans (30,000 completed by patients).

SEAMLESS MD

Patient Engagement solution specifically geared towards Surgery. The platform delivers customized clinical programs for pre-op and post-op patient engagement, data collection and monitoring across surgical episodes of care.

QUALCOMM LIFE

Cloud-based system that is an open ecosystem for medical devices and applications, enabling end-to-end wireless connectivity allowing medical device users and their   physicians/caregivers to easily access biometric data. This platform is a turnkey solution to monitor high risk patients in a home setting. During the Keynote address, Walgreens announced their partnership with Qualcomm Life. Qualcomm also recently announced a strategic relationship with Cerner.

VISUALDX

Visual Clinical Decision Support tool that allows physicians to enter a patient’s symptoms and information to help them diagnose rare diseases. VisualDx has been getting a lot of interest from EMR vendors from an integration standpoint due to new Smart on FHIR API Integration capabilities. Here is a great article that was written about the company recently: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/visualdx/

HEALTHLOOP

“Automates Fantastic” is the company’s slogan in regards to its high touch cloud-based Patient Engagement platform. Healthloop strives to help Health Systems, IDN’s and Practices provide quality care to its patients and improve the overall patient experience. Healthloop has recently earned a Net Promoter score as good or better than Apple which shows how much its users like and adopt its second-to-none design.

SOCIALWELLTH

Focused on Prescriptive Digital Health by providing access to over 100,000 apps and helping Providers, Employers and Payers prescribe the appropriate apps to the consumer based on their condition. Helps facilitate communication between consumers and their healthcare sponsors at the point of care. SocialWellth announced a new “Wellth Chips” program at HIMSS to incentivize consumers to use its platform.

MEDAWARE

Behavior based software solution that detects and eliminates prescription errors. Similar to fraud detection in the credit card industry, MedAware takes EMR data, builds a mathematical model which represents real-world treatment patterns and detects when a prescription largely deviates from the standard treatment spectrum.

CRITICAL ALERT

Nurse Call system that does not need middleware to be able to function. Combines Secure Messaging, RTLS, Real Time Dashboards and Reporting and Clinical Workflow Escalations to allow hospitals to improve patient satisfaction, enhance outcomes and drive down costs.

PINGMD

Communication platform that allows two-way message, call and video chat (both patient-to-physician and physician-to-physician). PingMD helps build a “professional dynamic network” so that physicians can give effective referrals. PingMD helps care teams manage a patient’s treatment.

EXTENSION HEALTHCARE

Alarm Management vendor that has built a next generation mobile platform that has been getting significant traction recently. Its open architecture allows seamless interoperability. Extension manages alarms, alerts and secure texting all under one umbrella to reduce alarm and interruption fatigue to improve workflow, response time and patient satisfaction.

APPSCRIPT

mHealth prescribing platform trying to make sense of over 125K health apps and 1000’s of wearables and clinical devices. IMS’s goal is to help doctors know which apps will provide the best clinical outcomes for specific conditions allowing Providers and Health Plans to better manage their populations.

AIRSTRIP

Mobile Interoperability platform that allows live remote monitoring enabling clinicians to access critical patient data whether they are inside or outside of the hospital. This innovative tool enables care collaboration and single workflow visualization to improve decision making. Airstrip’s goal is to provide clinicians with less overall data to quiet the “noise” but more actionable data to help treat patients effectively.

INTELLIGENT INSITES

Real-Time Operational Intelligence vendor that focuses on RTLS/RFID, Asset Management, Workflow Management, Environmental Monitoring, Patient Safety and Infection Control. Having both a mobile and desktop platform, Intelligent InSites provides its customers with second to none analytics and dashboards to improve financial and operational efficiency, quality, regulatory compliance and patient satisfaction.

Overall the conference displayed state-of-the-art healthcare technology. The emerging solutions that the companies I met with have developed will undoubtedly change the way healthcare is provided. Most impressive, was the incredible passion of the people I met with for what their companies are doing to improve healthcare delivery. I feel so lucky to work in an industry where people are so passionate for what they are doing and truthfully, it is what drives me to wake up and come to work to talk to so many interesting people every day!

For more information about HIMSS 2015, contact Norman Volsky 440-996-0059 or nv*****@di**************.com " href=" nv*****@di**************.com " target="_blank" rel="noopener"> nv*****@di**************.com