This blog, and hopefully some others following, will be about my thinking and considerations as I man an exhibition booth at the huge HIMSS12 conference for the first time next month… Well, we’ve committed. We’re bringing some of the key Ocean offerings all across the ocean to HIMSS12 in Las Vegas next month. If it was just another conference, I wouldn’t be writing about it. But this is a seriously daunting prospect for me. I’ve presented papers, organised workshops, and run conference booths in many places over the years – in Sarajevo, Göteborg, Stockholm, Capetown, Singapore, London, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne – but this is sooooooo different!
The equivalent conference here in Australia would gather 600-800 delegates, maybe 40-50 exhibition booths. Most European conferences seem to be a similar size, admittedly these are probably with a more academic emphasis, rather than such a strong commercial bent, which might explain some of the size difference. By comparison, last year’s HIMSS conference had 31,500 attendees and over 1000 exhibition booths – no incorrect zeros here - just mega huge!
I can’t even begin to imagine how one can accommodate so many people in one location. I have never even visited HIMSS before – we are relying heavily on second hand reports. You may start to understand my ‘deer in headlights’ sensation as we plan our first approach to the US market in this way.
Ocean's profile is much higher elsewhere internationally. Our activity in the London-based openEHR Foundation and our products/consulting skills have a reasonable profile in Australia and throughout much of Europe; and awareness is growing in Brazil as the first major region in South America. In many ways the US is the one of the last places for openEHR to make a significant impression – there are some pockets of understanding, but the limited uptake is clearly an orthogonal approach to the major commercial drivers in the US at present, however we are observing that this is slowly changing... hence our decision to run the gauntlet!
openEHR’s key objective is creation of a shareable, lifelong health record - the concept of an application-independent, multilingual, universal health record. The specification is founded upon the the notion of a health record as a collection of actual health information, in contrast to the common idea that a health record is an application-focused EHR or EMR. In the openEHR environment the emphasis is on the capture, storage, exchange and re-use of application-independent data based on shared definitions of clinical content – the archetypes and templates, bound to terminology. In openEHR we call them archetypes; in ISO, similar constructs are referred to as DCMs; and, most recently, there are the new models proposed by the CIMI initiative. It’s still all about the data!
So, we’re planning to showcase two products that have been designed and built to contribute to an openEHR-based health record - the Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM), as the collective resource for the standardised clinical content, and OceanEHR, which provides the technical and medico-legal foundation for any openEHR-based health record – the EHR repository, health application platform and terminology services. In addition, we’ll be demonstrating Multiprac – an infection control system that uses the openEHR models and is built upon the OceanEHR foundation. So Multiprac is one of the first of a new generation of health record applications which share common clinical content.
This will be interesting experience as neither are probably the sort of product typical attendees will be looking for when visiting the HIMSS exhibition. So therein lies one of our major challenges – how to get in touch with the right market segment… on a budget!
We are seeking to engage with like-minded individuals or organisations who prioritise the health data itself and, in particular, those seeking to use shared and clinically verified definitions of data as a common means to:
- record and exchange health information;
- simplify aggregation of data and comparative analysis; and
- support knowledge-based activities.
These will likely be national health IT programs; jurisdictions; research institutions; secondary users of data; EHR application developers; and of course the clinicians who would like to participate in the archetype development process.
So far I have in my arsenal:
- The usual on-site marketing approach:
- a booth - 13342
- company and product-related material on the HIMSS Online Buyers Guide; and
- marketing material – we have some plans for a simple flyer, with a mildly Australian flavour;
- Leverage our website, of course;
- Developing a Twitter plan for @oceaninfo specifically with activity in my @omowizard account to support it, and anticipating for some support from @openEHR – this will be a new strategy for me;
- And I’m working on development of a vaguely ‘secret weapon’ – well, hopefully my idea will add a little ‘viral’ something to the mix.
So all in all, this will definitely be learning exercise of exponential proportions.
To those of you who have done this before, I’m very keen to receive any insight or advice at this point. What suggestions do you have to assist a small non-US based company with non-mainstream products make an impact at HIMSS?