STAT February 8, 2019
Health care’s digital transformation will take center stage in Orlando, Fla., next week at the industry’s most influential technology conference, a gathering whose exponential growth is a metaphor for the change sweeping through one of America’s biggest economic sectors.
Once a meeting of a few thousand health technology insiders, the annual conference of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) now attracts more than 40,000 attendees and some of the world’s biggest companies.
It is a place where the ambitions of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants converge — and sometimes clash — before an audience of doctors, politicians, and hospital executives. As opposed to years past, when the embrace of digital health was more tentative, those audience members...