HIMSS-12 $ucked. There I said it! I feel much better, and the people I talked to throughout the conference were feeling the same way. I guess the metric was the Orlando HIMSS11 conference. Last year I had a problem picking an education session to attend because there were so many excellent sessions. This year I did not have very many tick marks on the session brochure.
There are many reasons to go to HIMSS, and I am sure that since it was in Vegas there were other reasons added to the list. For me, I like to attend the sessions. What makes our industry exciting is that it is constantly changing and evolving. So with the exception of one of the roundtable discussions, most of the sessions were very bland. I finally found a session that looked very interesting, and then the speaker fumbled through the slide deck because apparently they did not have his latest version. When he asked us to “imagine” the slide he wanted to talk about, I thought it was perfect given the constant state of illusion in Vegas.
The upside was all the networking, the great people and of course the Vendor-Palooza. Another bright side was the University of West Florida booth which I will Blog about separately. So the question people were asking was “if it was worth going?” My answer, “Any trip to Vegas is always a gamble, this year I lost money.”
