Photo Gallery From HIMSS 2019

The company Biodigital at HIMSS 2019 last week showed augmented reality anatomy for education, patient education and surgical training. They offered several organ models, including the heart. Using an augmented reality headset, hand and voice commands, users can rotate, slice through, and change the heart rate. The user can walk around the heart to get a complete 360 view. Examples of augmented and virtual reality could be found in several booths across the expo floor showing how this technology might be used to transform healthcare.

At the opening session of HIMSS 2019, Manish Kohli, MD, a cancer biomarker researcher at Mayo Clinic, spoke about the role of health IT in bringing together all aspects of healthcare. “We are all tied together for one collective purpose - to make healthcare better. We serve a purpose that is larger than any of us.”

Five new advanced visualization apps were released this week at HIMSS 2019 for Fujifilm’s Synapse 3D radiology software. These are images from a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) breast analysis software. The colorful kinetic curve threshold view shows the wash in and wash out of gadolinium contrast to define if a tumor is benign or a cancer.

Radiologist Cree Gaskin, M.D., University of Virginia, explained in sessions how new enterprise imaging software allows key images and links to prior exams to be embedded into radiology reports.

An example of how prior images for a cancer patient can be called up and embedded into a radiology report using an artificial intelligence driven software from Carestream. Radiologist Cree Gaskin, M.D., University of Virginia, explained in sessions how new enterpise imaging software allows key images and links to prior exams to be embedded into radiology reports.

An example of how prior images for a cancer patient can be called up and embedded into a radiology report using an artificial intelligence driven software from Carestream. Radiologist Cree Gaskin, M.D., University of Virginia, explained in sessions how new enterpise imaging software allows key images and links to prior exams to be embedded into radiology reports.

GE Healthcare highlighted its analytics software for radiology department business management at HIMSS19. It offers a view over the entire department, but enables granular drill down to analytics for specific machines, protocols, rooms and technologists to find bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

GE Healthcare highlighted its analytics software for radiology department business management at HIMSS19. It offers a view over the entire department, but enables granular drill down to analytics for specific machines, protocols, rooms and technologists to find bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

View over a portion of the vast HIMSS 2019 expo floor.

Here is an example of new IT that aims to improve efficiency, speed workflow and make finding relevant patient data fast. This is the new Philips Intellispace Oncology platform. This dash board page for a cancer patient offers a great overview on a single screen so physicians don’t have to do a lot of clicking around to find what they need. The top of the screen has a timeline showing all patient encounters related to their cancer, including imaging exams, labs, pathology, procedures, etc. All are clickable and show a small pop-up box with a key image and brief description, and a link to the full set of images and the full report. Other boxes on the screen help organize the relevant patient data into easily digestible bits with links to full reports or areas of the patient record. An analytics button at the bottom of the page opens a window showing charts for things like tumor follow-up assessments to quickly show if the patient is responding to treatment.

This is a cool new technology unveiled at HIMSS 2019 developed by Siemens called the digital twin heart. This work-in-progress research technology creates a digital organ that has the same electrophysiology characteristics as the patient’s real heart, created from a patient’s ECG, MRI scan and other data. It is aimed primarily at optimizing cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) lead placement. CRT currently has a 30 percent nonresponder rate, which is mainly due to the placement of leads. This model allows virtual placement of the leads In various locations to test response prior to the implantation procedure. The green dot shows the location of the virtual lead. Siemens said the technology also might have applications for virtual ablations. Link to a VIDEO example.

DAIC and ITN Editor Dave Fornell with Hal Wolf, president and CEO of the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) at the society’s annual meeting this week. Wolf spoke at the opening session about the “silver tsunami” that is starting to wash over healthcare that will lead to shortages of both doctors and support staff. “We do not have enough people to continue the level of care we currently provide using an encounters-based healthcare system,” Wolf said. “Our end-game is the efficient delivery of care to all patients.” To do this, he said information technology, new device technologies and artificial intelligence will need to be leveraged to increase efficiency and access to care.

The company Cardiologs demonstrated its artificial intelligence ECG interpretation software. It has European CE mark and FDA clearances to detect a variety of arrhythmias from various ECG sources, from 1 to 12 lead. The AI uses a histogram of the digital data from the ECG (the fuzzy seismic-looking waveform in the photo) and the rhythm strip to interpret the exam. It was trained using pattern recognition with more than 1 million ECGs. The company is aiming the technology at the general practitioner, telemedicine, ambulatory ECG, and emergency medicine where ECG plays an important role, but is often read by a non-cardiologist.

The ride share services Lyft and Uber both had booths on the HIMSS show floor for its business services for hospitals. Both ride share services offer a way for invalid, elderly, or patients without access to a car to still make appointments or procedures. The companies said the ride share can be used to help speed discharges to cut length of stay. The service also can help avoid readmissions. The ride share apps are integrated into the hospital computer system to pre-arrange rides.

How wearable devices will play a role in healthcare was a big topic at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) 2019 meeting. A good example of how wearables are being integrated in care was demonstrated on the expo floor by the company Datos. The company offers software that can integrate data from a wide variety of wearable devices from several makers into a mobile app that can transfer the information to an electronic medical record. The app also offers two way communication between the patient and the doctor’s office. The app has analytics on a patient’s health data, including charts and graphs. The system is used by Sheba Medical Center in Israel for a remote cardiac rehabilitation program. It now remotely monitors hundreds of patients and does not require them to come to the hospital for sessions.

Hal Wolf, president and CEO of the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) at the society’s annual meeting this week. Wolf spoke at the opening session about the “silver tsunami” that is starting to wash over healthcare that will lead to shortages of both doctors and support staff.

Congenital heart cardiologist and artificial intelligence (AI) expert Anthony Chang, MD, took time out at HIMSS 2019 to meet with DAIC Editor Dave Fornell. Chang spoke today at the day-long AI symposium. He is the chief intelligence and innovation officer and medical director of the Sharon Disney Lund Medical intelligence and Innovation Institute in Orlando, Fla. He did a video interview on how Cardiology is the ideal subspecialty for AI applications. Areas include use in automated diagnostics of complex imaging (think congenital heart) or alerts to patients or doctors when patient wearable devices detect atrial fibrillation. He said AI is already finding its way into clinical decision support for cardiology to immediately find relevant guidelines. He said population health applications will play a major roll as AI sifts through large volumes of patient data to help identify the patient’s at high risk for readmissions.

Karl Poterack, M.D., medical director, applied clinical informatics, Mayo Clinic Hospital, explained the role wearable devices will play in healthcare in an interview with ITN Editor Dave Fornell. Poterack spoke in the HIMSS 2019 session “Wearable Device Data: Signal or Noise?”

A key message for health IT in the digital age at the the world's largest health IT conference.

Here are some examples of how newer cardiology reporting systems can improve the value of reports and speed workflow. This is the latest example of Fujifilm’s cardiology reporting software released this week at HIMSS 2019. It uses a digital coronary tree where vessels can be modified to match the patient’s anatomy with simple drag and drop and stretch mouse movements. Icons for devices or conditions can be dragged from the side of the screen onto vessel segments and modified to match the patient condition or therapy used. This offers an immediate overview of the patient in picture form, rather than requiring a long read through text descriptions. Also, all the modified areas of the image automatically add text elements to the final report to save time on the text portion. The software also allows drag and drop hyperlinked text for common terms like “TIMI flow” or “FFR” so referring physicians can click on it to get an immediate description defining the term, measure or procedure.

Five new advanced visualization apps were released this week at HIMSS 2019 for Fujifilm’s Synapse 3D radiology software. These are images from a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) breast analysis software. The colorful kinetic curve threshold view shows the wash in and wash out of gadolinium contrast to define if a tumor is benign or a cancer.

ITN Contributing Editor Greg Freiherr conducting an interview in the Siemens booth at HIMSS 2019.

A sunset in Orlando, Fla. during HIMSS 2019.

DAIC and ITN Editor Dave Fornell is attending the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2019 meeting this week in Orlando. The conference has 45,000 attendees and more than 1,300 vendors across a vast show floor. The conference has become one of the most important in medicine over the past decade because of the interconnected, central role of electronic medical records, reporting systems and data created, stored and transferred with everything from ECGs and hemodynamic data, to radiology and echocardiography images.

A view of Biodigital's augmented reality heart seen through an augmented reality headset.

Example of new IT systems that aim to improve efficiency, speed workflow and make finding relevant patient data fast— the new Philips Intellispace Oncology platform. This dash board page for a cancer patient offers a great overview on a single screen so physicians don’t have to do a lot of clicking around to find what they need. The top of the screen has a timeline showing all patient encounters related to their cancer, including imaging exams, labs, pathology, procedures, etc. All are clickable and show a small pop-up box with a key image and brief description, and a link to the full set of images and the full report. Other boxes on the screen help organize the relevant patient data into easily digestible bits with links to full reports or areas of the patient record. An analytics button at the bottom of the page opens a window showing charts for things like tumor follow-up assessments to quickly show if the patient is responding to treatment.

Andrew Deutsch, MD, radiologist and the president and CEO of Renaissance Medical Imaging Associates (RIMA) spoke in a HIMSS 2019 session on how RIMA has leveraged new radiology PACS technology to unify its 65 sites, 120 radiologists in numerous locations to read more than 1.5 million imaging studies per year. Deutsch took time out at the conference to speak with ITN Editor Dave Fornell in a video interview. RIMA uses an artificial intelligence-based workflow orchestration system from Carestream that helps achieve efficiency in balancing reading workloads equitably, meets the timing in service level agreements and ensures exams are routed to appropriate expert readers.

Five new advanced visualization apps were released this week at HIMSS 2019 for Fujifilm’s Synapse 3D radiology software. These are images from a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) breast analysis software.

This is a sample of the new cardiac MRI analysis software released by Fujifilm this week at the HIMSS 2019 conference.

Five new advanced visualization apps were released this week at HIMSS 2019 for Fujifilm’s Synapse 3D radiology software. These are images from a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) breast analysis software. The colorful kinetic curve threshold view shows the wash in and wash out of gadolinium contrast to define if a tumor is benign or a cancer.

This is the main aisle at the massive Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) 2019 conference, which drew more than 45,000 attendees this week. It shows one side of the conference which had booths numbering into the 9,000s and more than 1,300 vendors. HIMSS has become one of the most influential healthcare conferences in the past decade because of the key role health IT systems play.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are starting to be adopted for physician training, patient education about their planned procedures, treatment planning and it is expected to be used as a procedure guidance tool in the near future. This week at the large HIMSS 2019 health informatics conference, there are dozens of examples of this technology on the floor. This is a really innovative example AR being developed by the company SoftServe. The “Touch My Heart” work-in-progress allows anyone wearing an AR headset to see and interact with the heart. However, it goes a step beyond that to offer a touch sensation when you reach into the heart. A pad below the image is composed of dozens of ultrasound transducers that emit sound waves in the shape of the heart so users feel touch sensations when their hand enters the virtual tissue.

Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), spoke at the HIMSS 2019 opening session.

A demonstration of virtual reality (VR) to aid neuro-surgical planning and to help educate patients on what will happen during their procedures. This demo was in the e+ and Surgical Theater VR booths.

The health IT market research firm KLAS is a big player at HIMSS. It grades companies software based on user feedback surveys to rank IT companies in numerous categories, including PACS. The firm gives an annual "Best in KLAS" award to the top performers.

GE Healthcare highlighted its analytics software for radiology department business management at HIMSS19. It offers a view over the entire department, but enables granular drill down to analytics for specific machines, protocols, rooms and technologists to find bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

Karen DeSalvo, M.D., MPH, MSc, former National Coordinator for Health IT, spoke at the opening session at HIMSS 2019.

Les Folio, DO, MPH, MDc, MAS, lead radiologist for CT, National Institutes Of Health (NIH), spoke in sessions on use of AI-assisted radiology workflow where links to images and prior exams can be embedded in the radiology report using dictation. He said the new technology can be leveraged to improve radiology reporting.

The Schiller Cardiovit FT-1 electrocardiograph (ECG) system displayed at HIMSS 2019 today. It has a 3-D rendering of a patient showing where each lead needs to be placed. The user can rotate the images on the touch screen to see where the leads go and can easily identify where any issues are when the system automatically alerts them about misplaced leads. The goal is to improve and speed ECGs using a better form of visualization than the traditional black and white 2D pictures. The system changes the lead place placements of the body rending based on the type of exam being performed using a drop down menu.

Mike Ciancio left, imaging systems administrator at Carolina East Health System, took time out at HIMSS to speak with ITN Editor Dave Fornell about advances in radiology informatics.

Pick your poison for health IT dilemmas. A creative way to draw in Hospital IT administrators at the annual HIMSS 2019 conference this week.

Pick your poison for health IT dilemmas. A creative way to draw in Hospital IT administrators at the annual HIMSS 2019 conference this week.

Analytics was one of the major topics this year at HIMSS 2019. Now that most hospitals have modern electronic medical record systems, mining the data they house has become a priority for many health organizations that want to have a better view of their business, workflow and to enable next generation applications like population health and predictive analytics.

How wearable devices will play a role in healthcare was a big topic at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) 2019. A good example of how wearables are being integrated in care was demonstrated on the expo floor by the company Datos. The company offers software that can integrate data from a wide variety of wearable devices from several makers into a mobile app that can transfer the information to an electronic medical record. The app also offers two way communication between the patient and the doctor’s office. The app has analytics on a patient’s health data, including charts and graphs. The system is used by Sheba Medical Center in Israel for a remote cardiac rehabilitation program. It now remotely monitors hundreds of patients and does not require them to come to the hospital for sessions.

This is a wireless pill box that interfaces with an app on a smartphone to notify the patient, caregivers and physicians office when a patient is taking their medications, or if they missed a dose. The device sends a signal from the pill box to the app each time a door is opened.

This is a sample of the new cardiac MRI analysis software released by Fujifilm this week at the HIMSS 2019 conference.

Nuclear imaging workstation shown in the Fujifilm booth at HIMSS.

A radiation therapy treatment plan showing contours of critical structures that beams need to avoid to limit damage to healthy tissue. This was show on a workstation in the Elekta booth at HIMSS 2019.

Two health IT vendors on the HIMSS 2019 expo floor had these massive versions of the game “Operation” in an effort to to draw in attendees.

A digital pathology slide called up on a Sectra workstation. As healthcare moves toward a totally digital record environment, pathology departments are being integrated with digital images of their slides, analysis software and reporting that integrates into electronic medical records..

A lot of selfies were shot under this sign in the Smart Data Solutions booth at HIMSS 2019.

This is a 3D printed crown made on the show floor of HIMSS 2019, worn by Claire Pfarr from the healthcare IT company OneView.

This is an example of the Fujifilm REiLI artificial intelligence application for radiology, showing auto identification and quantification of a pleural effusion and fibrosis with color coding showing the areas of detected anomalies. The software was highlighted at RSNA last November and at HIMSS this past week.

This small box is the entire enterprise imaging PAC or cardiology information system for a hospital or an entire hospital system. This is ScImage’s solution to link to its cloud-based PICOM 365 system. If the box is stolen, the data on it is encrypted. The company said this is a selling point with Health IT administrators because of the ease of installation and maintenance.

Steve Holloway, chief analyst with U.K.-based Signify Reseach, took time out at HIMSS 2019 this past week to do a video interview with ITN Editor Dave Fornell on trends in enterprise imaging systems.

Examples of Augmented reality offered as an FDA-cleared product by NovaRad at HIMSS 2019 last week. The system integrates MRI or CT imaging datasets into a HoloLens headset and landmarks are registered to the patient on an operating table. The user can make hand gestures in mid air to scroll through the image slices. The goal of the system is to allow for surgical planning.

The ride share services Lyft and Uber both had booths on the HIMSS 2019 expo floor with its business services for hospitals. Both ride share services offer a way for invalid, elderly, or patients without access to a car to still make appointments or procedures. The companies said the ride share can be used to help speed discharges to cut length of stay. The service also can help avoid readmissions. The ride share apps are integrated into the hospital computer system to pre-arrange rides.

Semi-automated anatomical labeling can aid navigating complex anatomy, as shown here in finding the pancreas (in yellow). The green dot is a tumor. Color coding anatomy like this helps speed workflow and makes areas of interest easier to find for referring physicians, radiation oncologists and surgeons. This is an example show by Fujifilm at HIMSS 2019.