Report From HIMSS: Health Care Tries to Leap the Chasm From the Average to the Superb

I couldn't attend the session today on StealthVest--and small surprise. Who wouldn't want to come see an Arduino-based garment that can hold numerous health-monitoring devices in a way that is supposed to feel like a completely normal piece of clothing? As with many events at the HIMSS conference, which has registered over 35,000 people (at least four thousand more than last year), the StealthVest presentation drew an overflow crowd.

StealthVest sounds incredibly cool (and I may have another chance to report on it Thursday), but when I gave up on getting into the talk I walked downstairs to a session that sounds kind of boring but may actually be more significant: Practical Application of Control Theory to Improve Capacity in a Clinical Setting.

The speakers on this session, from Banner Gateway Medical Center in Gilbert, Arizona, laid out a fairly standard use of analytics to predict when the hospital units are likely to exceed their capacity, and then to reschedule patients and provider schedules to smooth out the curve. The basic idea comes from chemical engineering, and requires them to monitor all the factors that lead patients to come in to the hospital and that determine how long they stay. Queuing theory can show when things are likely to get tight. Hospitals care a lot about these workflow issues, as Fred Trotter and David Uhlman discuss in the O'Reilly book Beyond Meaningful Use, and they have a real effect on patient care too...