It is usually on this day or the next—the Thursday or Friday before the start of the annual HIMSS Conference—that I write my annual “I’m flying down to HIMSS” blog, before I fly to Orlando or Las Vegas—the usual sites for the conference, for the event.
Well, as everyone already knows by now, the Chicago-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, or HIMSS, today (Thursday) cancelled its annual conference, which was to begin in just four days at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando.
In a statement posted to its website this morning, HIMSS officials wrote:
“Today, following recent reports from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), HIMSS announced it is clearly necessary to cancel the 2020 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition. ‘We recognize all the hard work that so many have put into preparing for their presentations and panels that accompany every HIMSS conference,’ said Hal Wolf, president and CEO of HIMSS. ‘Based on evaluation of evolving circumstances and coordination with an external advisory panel of medical professionals to support evidence-based decision making, it is clear that it would be an unacceptable risk to bring so many thousands of people together in Orlando next week.’ The advisory panel recognized that industry understanding of the potential reach of the virus has changed significantly in the last 24 hours, which has made it impossible to accurately assess risk. Additionally, there are concerns about disproportionate risk to the healthcare system given the unique medical profile of Global Conference attendees and the consequences of potentially displacing healthcare workers during a critical time, as well as stressing the local health systems were there to be an adverse event.” As the statement noted, this will be the first time in 58 years that the annual event has been cancelled.
Obviously, HIMSS senior executives made the right decision. Even the relatively low chance of coronavirus spread through the conference, given the fact that the majority of attendees work in patient care organizations, had reached the level of unacceptable risk.
What’s more, the cancellation of HIMSS20 fell in line with the wave of cancellations taking place across the United States and the world, as noted today in USA Today, among them the American Bar Associations National Institute on White-Collar Crime, scheduled for March 11-13 in San Diego; the American Physical Society’s annual meeting, scheduled for March 2-6 in Denver; the Inspired Home Show, set to be held by the International Housewares Association in Chicago March 14-17; and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which was just cancelled, and was to have taken place February 24-27.
So, the coronavirus is blazing a very dangerous and concerning path across virtually the entire planet right now, and is forcing public health officials, senior leaders at professional associations, and many others, to reassess everything, and to try to manage a vast range of unpredictable situations.
But could there possibly be any “silver lining” to this very challenging situation? Maybe there could be. As Managing Editor Rajiv Leventhal reported earlier this week, “Last week, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials stated that the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) will spread in the U.S., meaning that hospitals, communities and individuals should ramp up their preparedness efforts. One action patient care organizations could take, the department said, would be to add telehealth options. On a Feb. 25 media briefing call, Nancy Messonnier, M.D., director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, also noted, ‘Students in smaller groups or in a severe pandemic, closing schools and using internet-based teleschooling to continue education. For adults, businesses can replace in-person meetings with video or telephone conferences and increase teleworking options. On a larger scale, communities may need to modify, postpone, or cancel mass gatherings. Looking at how to increase telehealth services and delaying elective surgery.’”
Further, Leventhal wrote, “Following the CDC update last week, a STAT article noted that while telehealth could ‘help triage the sick and keep the worried well out of already-crowded medical facilities,’ major barriers still do exist. Historically, this healthcare sub-sector has found it challenging to win over consumers. ‘The biggest challenges stem from factors that don’t exist in China, like our vast array of private, state, and federal payers with varying reimbursement policies and state-based medical licensing,’ Linda Branagan, the director of the University of California, San Francisco’s telehealth program, told STAT.’”
In other words, could the current crisis move the needle in terms of helping to convince previously reluctant healthcare consumers to consider telehealth-delivered care as viable and worthwhile?
There are complications. As the STAT article noted, for actual examination in order to assess the potential that a patient might have the coronavirus, digital tools aren’t useful in the actual diagnostic process itself. But, as Leventhal wrote, “[A]t the same time, at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), ‘digital health tools originally designed for the flu are being turned into triage techniques for coronavirus, and the hospital is proactively reaching out to patients with flu and cold symptoms who had scheduled in-person visits to do video calls instead,’ according to STAT. What’s more, video visits are helping combat misinformation about coronavirus and keeping healthy people out of the hospital, Bruce Aylward, a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official who led a recent mission to China, said on a separate call last week, according to STAT.”
The healthcare market landscape seems to provide evidence that telehealth will gain from the current situation. As Leventhal wrote, “Telehealth company Teladoc, which provides virtual health services in more than 130 countries, said during the organization’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2019 earnings call last week that it’s expected a larger outbreak of the coronavirus in the U.S. would drive up the company's virtual visits. One out of every eight virtual visits in January was related to the flu, and over half of those visitors had not used Teladoc's platform before, according to Healthcare Dive, which covered the earnings call.”
Meanwhile, on another front, Leventhal recently reported, “Doing its part to contain the spread of the 2019 novel Coronavirus, the Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute is working on creating a series of codes to identify the lab tests used to screen patients for the virus.” As he noted, “The codes are part of a terminology system, created and maintained at Regenstrief, that is used around the world to identify laboratory and other health observations.
According to officials of the organization, “The new codes will make it easier to track cases of the 2019 novel Coronavirus in the United States and across the globe. With more complete tracking, health leaders can study the virus and create strategies to address and contain the outbreak.” The team also created codes during the Zika and SARS outbreaks, among others, officials noted. And, as Leventhal noted, “The codes to identify 2019 novel Coronavirus laboratory testing are part of a universal coding system called Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC), which was created at Regenstrief. The international system identifies health measurements, observations and documents.”
All of this is to say that healthcare and healthcare IT leaders could really make a difference in helping the U.S. healthcare delivery system to get a handle on some aspects of this public health crisis, even as public health agencies will need to play their part in this complex and challenging situation. And telehealth could be deployed in a number of ways that could minimize the spread of germs, while at the same time helping to relieve certain issues that are burdening frontline clinicians.
So the coming months are going to be challenging for the healthcare delivery system, both in the United States and globally. But there are opportunities in crises, and certainly, there are distinct opportunities in this crisis. Which, even though we weren’t able to gather together in Orlando next week, there will be developments that will present themselves in the coming weeks and months, that will bring us together in important, if virtual ways, going forward. And we at Healthcare Innovation will be there to track and share innovations in all the areas that can help move us forward as a healthcare delivery system—whether it means airplane flights or web searches.
