After connecting in a mostly virtual fashion over the past two years, the healthcare industry’s conference and event circuit has quickly revved back to life in 2022. TripleTree has been active at several industry gatherings this spring, including McDermott Will & Emery’s
HPE Miami 2022 conference,
RISE Nashville,
Home Care 100, and
Health Evolution Summit – but today we’re sharing our perspectives on one of the newest conferences on the block,
ViVE, and one of the industry’s mainstays,
HIMSS.
ViVE 2022
ViVE was a refreshing starting point getting back into the conference routine. In Miami, our team spent time connecting with healthcare leaders from around the country discussing what they are seeing in their respective end markets and where the biggest changes need to be made. A few specific themes that TripleTree has been monitoring over the past few years were very prevalent at the event.
- The Coordination and Collaboration of Data: Connectivity between payer, provider, and pharma data is a major theme in the broader structure of interoperability. The ability for key constituents to leverage data and technology across disparate systems to reduce the friction of adversarial payer-provider positions is a mission that many notable companies in attendance have been working to accomplish. In order to get to this next state of connectivity, data standardization in a comprehensible manner at a systemic, organizational, structural and functional level will need to take effect for the seamless flow of information across the healthcare continuum.
- A few notable companies representing the space at ViVE included: Smile CDR, a healthcare technology company reducing barriers between information and care; 1upHealth, an FHIR® (fast healthcare interoperability resources) platform who announced their $50 million Series B the week of the event; as well as other scaled players such as Innovaccer and Cerner to name a few.
- Expanding Access to Healthcare: The COVID-19 pandemic emphasized the already pressing healthcare issue of overburdened hospitals and provider burnout which has driven the widespread adoption of virtual care over the past two years. Industry leaders and recent startups have gone beyond traditional telehealth methods to expand the virtual landscape into remote patient monitoring, patient engagement, and artificial intelligence that couple the traditional in-person care models to holistically address the pressures put on health systems. Several companies are at the early stages of integrating devices and creating relevant clinical insights that impact the wellbeing of patients virtually, including Amazon Cares, Brave Health, Edgility Health, WellDoc and Unite Us.
HIMSS 2022
It seems like HIMSS, more than any other healthcare conference, has suffered the curse of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the start of the pandemic,the conference was cancelled in March 2020, well after plans were made and the exhibition hall was setup and ready for attendees. HIMSS 2021 occurred during a COVID-19 spike in Las Vegas, which resulted in a significantly downscaled presence.
This year saw the HIMSS conference returned to Orlando with TripleTree in attendance and a full slate of in-person meetings. While attendance still felt down from pre-pandemic levels, it was certainly good to return to in-person meetings and 1:1 sessions, especially at an event hosting more than 20,000 industry professionals. The show floor looked like any previous HIMSS with the usual mix of traditional healthcare IT vendors like 3M, Athena Health, Cerner, Change Healthcare, Nuance, and the other usual suspects, but also plenty of room for smaller startups and larger vendors focused on interoperability, analytics, telehealth, clinical workflow improvements, medical imaging and more. A couple of themes we noticed:
- Improving access to care and the patient experience through tele and virtual care: Not surprisingly, one of the major themes at the conference was the broad focus on improving patient access to care via telehealth and remote monitoring. Among the larger players, Teladoc and Amwell had a significant presence, but the theme was significantly present among probably more than 100 of the other exhibitors. Notable interesting standouts we visited included Electronic Caregiver whose Addison 3-D virtual caregiver is helping patients remain independent in the home, BioIntelliSense’s continuous health monitoring platform to facilitate vitals collection and Best Buy Health who recently acquired Current Health’s care at home technology platform.
- Better use of clinical data through integration: Consistent with previous years, clinical integration remains a significant theme, investment and innovation area for healthcare IT. Aside from vendors focused on electronic data exchanges and health information exchanges (HIEs) as a component of their overall solutions, we also spent time with groups including Health Catalyst, Innovaccer and Efferent Health who are building larger data platforms to better integrate data and clinical data and workflows to improve care and drive operational efficiencies.
Our bottom-line view is that HIMSS is here to stay. As HIMSS rebuilds its momentum, we are also intrigued by the energy around newer industry gatherings such as ViVE, and the more tailored and focused approaches of industry gatherings like RISE and Home Care 100. Healthcare is an industry that is continually improving not just in virtual care or interoperability, or frontline clinical workflow improvement or cybersecurity. As we engaged with the innovators, investors, and strategic players across the healthcare industry, we were thrilled to once-again join the conversations about the solutions helping make the healthcare system work better – and we are just glad to be back in-person (and not on-screen) as we enter this next phase of industry gatherings.