1️⃣0️⃣ Years of HIMSS Conferences
Bring on the next 10!
I still remember my first one: Chicago, 2015. I was working for a global HIMSS diamond partner, staffing a booth the size of an apartment, scanning badges, and learning all the ins and outs from Renee Close. (That is, until I got food poisoning and missed all day Wednesday, the biggest day of the week, lol. True story.) It was organized chaos at its finest, and I loved it. But my view of HIMSS from inside that booth was, let's say, curated. You see a lot of badge scans, and the conversations are very product- and company-specific.
10 HIMSSes later (with one year off, I missed you, 2025 😅), my relationship with this conference looks completely different. Startup life changed me, and consulting life changed me more. Now I'm not waiting for the conversations to come to me at a booth. I'm creating them, seeking them out, showing up with the intention of having the kinds of conversations that can hopefully move healthcare forward.
Last year I turned 40, and I've been in a very reflective season of my life. One thing is for sure: I'm a memory collector by nature, and HIMSS will always hold a special place in my heart for being such a key program in my early health IT years. Here were the themes that bubbled up for me across my 10th HIMSS conference.
The conversations you can't have on Zoom.
Before I even got to HIMSS, I did an episode with Brittany Quemby on the Swaay.Health podcast where we talked conference truths: conferences aren't a vending machine for warm leads; intentionality beats booth size every single time; and ROI is in the post-show magic.
I believed all of that going in. I believe it even more coming out. (Brit…follow-up podcast on our to-do list 😄)
One convo that has stayed with me was with a healthcare consultant on Monday evening. He and I went from bonding over our shared and intentional choice not to have kids (guys, this is pretty rare!) to unpacking what we're each doing in healthcare right now and why it matters. That's the range. That's what in-person does. You don't get from "zero to real" on a Zoom call. You get there in a hallway, over a meal, off the show floor, when two people decide to show up for the conversation without any pretense.
AI is no longer the shiny object. It's infrastructure. And infrastructure has to perform.
I wrote about this after ViVE in Healthcare IT Today, and HIMSS doubled down on it. The "prove it to me" energy was everywhere. A phrase I heard at ViVE, "theatrical innovation,” kept echoing in my head throughout so many conversations at HIMSS. We've all seen the demos that look gorgeous and deliver nothing. Health system leaders are done.with.those.
This year, I joined the HIMSS Executive Summit, and the panel hosted by Mike Mosquito, CHCIO, MBA, PMP, CDH-E and Maureen Nylin MSN RN, CHCIO, PMP, CDH-E from THE BUZZ PODCAST, featuring Joe L. and Brett Moran, MD from Parkland Health and Jose Mayorga, MD and Ray Lowe from AltaMed Health Services covered a range of topics.
Highlights included:
There still is a gap between CIOs and CFOs on ROI, and it’s not going away. CFOs want (need!) hard returns within the fiscal year. Clinical AI implementations take three months to contract, six months to implement, and then need time to actually be live before any value is realized.
Ambient listening is a perfect example of this, and the honest answer from the stage was that most physicians won’t fill recovered documentation time with more patient visits. They’ll use it to be more present, more human. That’s a soft ROI, and it’s still ROI. This technology, like it or not, is becoming a new cost of doing business. We already know organizations that don’t invest in ambient are losing ground in provider recruitment and retention.
AI governance is not one-size-fits-all, but the embedded approach is winning. There are two phenotypes emerging: organizations that treat AI governance as an isolated silo, and those that embed it within their existing digital strategy.
Parkland has done the embedded approach deliberately, because they don’t want AI approached as a one-off solution. Multidisciplinary governance with clinical, operational, business, IT, legal, risk, and compliance representation isn’t optional; it’s the foundation. And ownership follows influence: whoever has the most at stake should lead, with the CIO maintaining ultimate accountability across the portfolio.
And on ambient listening... I overheard a convo between an ambient listening vendor and a health system (my absolute jam!) where the vendor had to gently tell the health system leaders that trying to find hard ROI in more visits isn't actually what their best practices recommend. Which is honest and important…but it also highlights how much education still needs to happen around what "success" even looks like with some of these tools. Soft ROI is still ROI. It just requires a different conversation.
The through-line from ViVE to HIMSS is this: if 2025 was about what AI could do, 2026 is about what it has actually delivered. AI can expand reach, close care gaps, and reduce friction, but judgment, accountability, and responsibility remain human work. That part doesn't get outsourced.
The people building technology from personal pain, not market opportunity.
Some of my favorite HIMSS conversations happen off the show floor. One afternoon outside (fresh air + a meaningful business convo = my version of a perfect meeting☀️), I sat with healthcare leaders who are designing and building something entirely new: a CIO, a physician who became a health system CEO and has held government health positions, and a seasoned industry product executive.
Together, they're building technology focused on the friction that all of us as patients, and our families, face when trying to navigate care. The kind of friction that doesn't show up in a product roadmap but shows up constantly in real life. The technology is real, the beta is live, and the “why” behind it is deeply and unmistakably personal.
I left that table thinking about my own father-in-law: someone my husband helps navigate care for from 2 hours away, through phone calls and FaceTimes and in-person visits. But this new technology could be a game changer, both for my husband and his dad. SO many families are navigating exactly what this product is trying to solve, and it feels different when the people building the solution have actually lived the problem. That's not a coincidence…that's a pattern. The best things being built in healthcare right now are coming from people who got frustrated enough, personally and not just professionally, to do something about it.
The equity gap that keeps showing up, no matter what room you're in.
Between seeing their leaders on stage and getting the chance to have real conversations with a couple other leaders, AltaMed was a surprise through-line of the week. I've had the chance to chat a few times now with Dr. Eric Lee about the real challenges and opportunities facing a health system like theirs... the kind of candid, "here's what we're navigating today" convos I genuinely look forward to. And this HIMSS, I met Adrienne Martinez-Hollingsworth, PhD, RN, PHN, WAN! — we ended up having lunch standing outside, technically near the smoking section, definitely not glamorous, but the fresh air and the conversation were worth every bit of it. She's a Director of Research and Evaluation at their health equity institute and the work spans cancer care, language-congruent services, early pregnancy loss, and equitable AI partnership models for community clinics. Adrienne is the kind of researcher who expands what you think is possible, not in a way that makes you feel small, but in a way that makes you realize the ceiling you assumed was there isn't actually there.
Her work connects directly to something that kept surfacing across multiple conversations at HIMSS: the communities that need innovation most are the ones least likely to receive it. A convo with Scott McEachern, CHCIO from Southern Coos Hospital & Health Center echoed all of this; we talked about the CHIME Rural Health community and the intentionality behind how they are positioning the group to build awareness and advocacy for the people and places that don't always make it onto the main stage.
While I am not a fan of the phrase "now more than ever," I begrudgingly use it when it truly applies: with Medicaid reimbursement cuts threatening the financial viability of critical access hospitals, federal rural health programs facing funding uncertainty, and workforce shortages that were already at crisis levels before anyone added AI to the conversation — the stakes for getting this right have never been higher for the communities that can least afford for us to get it wrong.
The technology that could save lives in a critical access hospital or rural nursing home is still priced for health systems with enterprise budgets, and for me, this is personal. I saw up close how technology like this could have given my gram more time with us, instead of a fall in a place where there was no one and nothing there to catch her.
The innovation gap is a moral gap. And there are people in our industry who are absolutely refusing to accept it. 👏🏼👏🏼
The thing about HIMSS (and conferences in general) is that the value only partially lives in the agenda.
It lives in the conversation you weren't expecting. The table you got placed at. The person who said something true and made you lean in instead of look at your phone.
Healthcare is hard right now. Reimbursements are tightening, boards are sharpening pencils, and the margin reality is unavoidable. The people trying to navigate all of it are tired in the way that only happens when you genuinely care about the outcome. But they keep showing up. They keep building. They keep having the conversations that need to be had — in hallways, over standing lunches, and in rooms (and restaurants and receptions) at HIMSS. That's what this industry is.
Ten HIMSSes in. Still collecting memories and convos and connections.
Til next year!