Living and working in our virtual company we know a lot of people but have never actually met them. HIMSS was our way to come face to face with people we have been working with over the past year and some new ones we hope to work with in the coming year. Here is our wrap up of who we met.
Our own Jim Tate gave a dinner at Wild Kingdom Disney World where we met some new vendors in the market. There was Roberto Di Gonzaga the CTO of Indra, Goutam Bhat of Levin Software, and George (no relation to ONC) Blumenthal representing his product eHealth Made EASY. We also met Mark Benvegnu of HIT Marketing Solutions for HIT vendors. Neil Versel was there and a special thanks to him for the great posts on attending HIMSS he wrote for us.
We got in a lunch at the Peabody (minus the ducks) with our favorite Professor, Bill Hersh. The jet setter was coming from meeting with Obama dropping in at HIMSS then off to Singapore. Dr. Hersh is the Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University. He was instrumental in getting the ONC Workforce programs implemented. He agreed to doing a presentation for us and we look forward to it.
And speaking of presentations for us, we had a great dinner with Feisal Nanji and Pete Niner of  Techumen. Pete did a great event for us on Security Risk Assessment and Feisal is giving an encore presentation of his HIMSS presentation, Securing Health Information in the Cloud for us. They brought along and introduced us to Morris Stemp and Jim Taylor from Stemp Systems from Long Island. Morris tells me he is writing a book on EHR implementation and I am hoping we can make it available to our readers.
At yet another dinner we caught up with John Lynn who we actually met last year at a conference in Vegas. Check out John’s blog EMR and HIPAA. And we were able to finally met our contributing legal counsel, Bill O’Toole. His Massachusetts law firm specializes in HIT law. Check out his event on EHR contract negotiations in the Memebers Only section.
After almost a year we finally met Bob, Jay, and Chris from C3 Partners. They were first time exhibitors introducing their Meaningful Use Monitor product. We also met some of their Business Partners at the booth, Jay Moskowitz from Muse Incentive Consulting, Penny Zeller from New West, and Josh and Tim from Apex Health Systems. Bill Oravecz from WTO Associates stopped by the booth on Wednesday to catch up. He was fresh off moderating 3 sessions on Tuesday.
And through all the meet and greets, breakfast meetings, cocktails, Disney attractions, dinners, and exhibitors I think the highlight of my trip was literally running into ONC David Blumenthal at Maggiano’s Italian restaurant. He was coming in and I was leaving. I did not miss the opportunity and introduced myself, shook his hand, and sincerely thanked him for his great job. I don’t think he realized he has groupies!
Thanks to everyone for a great time, see you in Vegas.