Wanted to recap the list of things I walked away with today from the conference at MS-HUG:

Keynote address

Bill Crounse, MD, Director Worldwide Health Microsoft Corporation

Well, I got to listen to Bill (no not that Bill) and it was interesting, I learned today that CMS will significantly curtail the payments of procedures for in hospital infections. This will have rippling effects for the providers, and will spurn the pay for performance initiatives and quality of care initiatives as hospitals will now have to foot the bill for those issues.

Winning Trust, Minimizing IT Resources: Key to Forming RHIOs

Mark Singh President Clinicore Solutions

Kathleen Sullivan CEO Salient Health Solutions/SEMRHIO Consultant

Being the architect I am very much aware of what is going on (I had better!), however it was interesting because most of the questions were focused on the business model, the revenue generation process. This is the next phase in our process, but having a working process in place I feel is the key to success as we now have 3 hospitals up with minimal IT resources.

Reference Implementations for Healthcare: HCE and iHE XDS.b(sorry the link does not work as of yet)

Roberto Ruggeri Senior Technical Strategist for Microsoft Worldwide Health Microsoft Corporation

Randy Fusco Technical Strategist for Microsoft US Health Providers Microsoft Corporation

This was a great presentation where I learned about how much Microsoft is looking for us to help. For those who write blogs and to those who read blogs (you know who you are) it was a call to action! Yes you!

On http://solshare.net you can download the code and start to try it out and using their forum, you can submit bugs, ask for enhancements, etc.

I asked if there was a list of known issues, in which Roberto told me that no, this was a feature, that we get to start our own list and he will see if we really know what we are doing! (j/k) Seriously, he said that there is no existing list of issues, so I would assume that you can post those known issues/fixes directly on the solshare.net site.

Lunch

I went out to eat with Eric Battalio, Muhammad, and Liza from the documentation team, and wow, I learned a lot! The first and most important thingI learned is that those comments that you can leave on the documentation site actually go to someone. My suggestion is that if you want to start a dialog with the documentation team (which by the way, they would LOVE), it would be nice to have some type of post submission question asking if you (the feedbacker) would like to be contacted by Microsoft and what email they can contact you.

In the interim, just put your email address in the comments so they can contact you directly, Iassume that there will be something in the worksaddressing this issue.Below is an example of something I have had on the back of my mind recently.

Improving Patient Safety Using the Microsoft Common User Interface (MS-CUI)

Andrew Kirby Director of Solutions Development Center Microsoft Corporation, UK

Like the CHF, this is very much a work in progress and since it is very early on in the development, it is more of a guideline and they need as much feedback as possible. However there are no immediate plans for a reference implementation to build off of other than the first implementation in England.

What’s New in BizTalk Server 2006 R2

Stuart Landrum Program Manager, BizTalk, Microsoft Corporation

Well, it was the first time I had met Stuart face to face, had been on some conference calls with him, so it was good to meet him. He explained the new features with the HL7 accelerator (now officially branded 2.0). There was very little pictures of the product so the discussion went rather quickly and ended early with few questions, I had to ask a few questions to get people in the asking mood, but it did not go much further than that.

Closing Keynote: Using IT to affect efficiency and safety changes in the erioperative process

Conclusion

Paul St. Jacques, MD Associate professor and Director of Perioperative informatics Vanderbilt University

This doctor was actually kind of funny. I am not sure if he meant to be, but if it was not for his phones (yes plural) that added a little static to his voice, or his low ranking on the pay for performance ratings that he refuse to show on the list of many doctors ranked (it was too small to see), it was a good presentation that ended on a high note, even though he essentially had to ask us to laugh, even though there wasn’t really anything funny about his presentation. He did use one of my all time favorite phrases, while describing the hospital system that he works in, he described it as a level 1 trauma facility that is “soup-to-nuts” – where did that come from and should we be saying that phrase as professionals?

The interesting thing that I thought that he was going to joke about was his workflow from a patient pre-registration process through surgery completion. look closely for anything wrong with this picture

nope, not the fact that they are using SQL Server 2003 (must be a special version of SQL Serverthat I am notaware of)

The real problem with this picture is that there is a little girl that starts the surgery process, and when the workflow is complete, thegirlis actuallyHenry Kissinger! Either that process took a really long time (and something major wrong happened), or this is a plastic surgeon’s billing dream come true!

Talk to you all tomorrow!