On the surface, HIMSS25 looked a lot like past HIMSS Conferences. And yes, I’ll take a point of privilege here to note that this was my thirty-third HIMSS Conference; I’ve been attending HIMSS ever since 1991, with only two breaks (in 1996, during a job transition, and in 2020, when the conference was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic), so I do have a longitudinal perspective on all this.
So yes, last week at the Venetian Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, there were all the usual keynote addresses and educational sessions, and the exhibit floor was crowded and buzzing with activity, as usual. And certainly, the messaging on the booths was hype-infused, as always. In addition this year, there was the truly horrifying addition of DJs positioned in a key area off the exhibit floor, and whose earth-shattering beat (there was no actual music, just a terrible beat) added a mindblowing new level of noise to an already inherently noisy conference.
But apart from the usual appearance and the horrifying DJs, though HIMSS25 looked a lot like recent HIMSSes, I detected this year a very strong undercurrent of something else—a kind of mature thinking around everything happening right now in healthcare information technology. Yes, there was a great deal of hype on the exhibit floor about artificial intelligence, though even there, I found the discussions with vendors to be tempered and quite reasonable. And in the educational sessions, I heard not one peep of hype; the opposite, in fact. Attending the AI Preconference Forum, I found the presentations and panel discussions to be very sober indeed, as the presenters and panelists all acknowledged that the path forward is going to be a complex and yes, long, one. And even as algorithmic Ai adoption has been joined now by the adoption of generative AI and more recently, agentic AI, the very kinds of AI that are being adopted are all extremely practical, particularly the development of adoption of generative AI for the creation of draft responses by physicians and nurses and staff, to patient questions, and of course, the ongoing adoption of ambient AI, including, more and more, ambient AI scribes (and there is complexity around whether any scribing—whether by humans or machines, is the best way to support physicians in the exam room—but that’s a subject for another blog).
As I’ve noted in several reports over the past week, the AI panel discussions last Monday were fascinating in their level of pointedness and practicality. For example, on Monday morning, during a panel entitled “Navigating AI Integration Through Change Management and Workforce Inclusion,” Irene Louh, M.D., an adult intensivist at Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Florida, noted that “AI is so promising for healthcare, for our workforce and teams,” Dr. Lowe said. The core of the healthcare provider is that we want to care for our patients and really improve patient health. Over time, healthcare has made it more difficult because of the structure and function, so any way we can really relieve that burden, is important; there are a lot of opportunities leveraging AI, so this is a really exciting time to be in healthcare and healthcare IT.”
And Mark Sendak, M.D., MPP, of the Duke Institute for Health Innovation in Durham, N.C., noted that “I would say that most of the use cases that I have worked on, putting AI into clinical practice, do try to relieve some of the clinical load, for frontline physicians. So one of the first use cases for us was identifying gaps in care for patients with increasing kidney disease and other chronic disease, trying to help the primary care doc in managing care and making sure folks are getting referrals, prescriptions, etc.; as well as identifying emerging sepsis.”
Similarly practical statements were made during a panel that afternoon entitled “Synaptic Sync: Building Strategic Technology partnerships for Effective AI Integration,” which delved into provider-vendor partnership issues. Neri Cohen, M.D., the panel’s moderator noted that, per hospital organizations’ currently straitened finances, “When we were running 15-20-percent margins, we had the luxury of time. Nowadays, the vast majority of healthcare organizations are running at sub-1-percent margins or in the red. So how do we accelerate processes and think about scalability?” he asked. And Nancy Beale, Ph.D., R.N., NI-BC, Famia, answered thus: “When I think about that in the context of systemness, it really builds on the foundation of systemness, to the extent you have it in your organization to start out with. So what assumptions are being leveraged to drive the model? If you don’t have solid foundations, you’re buying new curtains for your house, but the foundation is crumbling. So you have to have a solid foundation, and it all goes back to, what is the problem you’re trying to solve? None of those things are really separate. AI is a tool, like all software.”
Clearly, all the panelists on Monday were singing from the same songbook of practicality and commonsense. And that really struck me, as I had been attending the AI Preconference Forum for a few years since it had been added to the Preconference Forum list of selections, that the discussions this year were more pragmatic than ever.
And that gives me hope, because it’s clear that the leaders bringing AI into patient care organizations are taking very practical approaches to implementing the technology, neither grasping wildly for the shiniest object available nor rushing through processes without thought. Indeed, AI governance was a very big theme on Monday.
So I have to say that this might have seemed like the most pragmatic HIMSS Conference I’ve yet experienced. Of course, I could only sit in on so many sessions and have so many conversations at the conference. But I am buoyed, even as we enter a period of incredible policy and payment uncertainty at the federal level, that healthcare IT leaders nationwide are investing in and adopting the newer information technologies more thoughtfully than ever. And it will be fascinating to hear and participate in conversations at HIMSS26, which will once again take place at the Venetian Sands Convention Center. Let’s just get rid of those ridiculous DJs, shall we?
