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In just a few short weeks, 40,000 healthcare IT professionals will descend on the show floor in Orlando. With the final countdown on, here are a few simple reminders and things to consider as you head out the door.

Now that we have experience with two stages of meaningful use, it's also clear that a three year cycle is needed to ensure safe, high value, well adopted, introduction of new IT functionality.

After nearly 20 years as a CIO, I've learned that even with the best people, best planning and appropriate budgets, large, complex projects encounter issues imposed by external factors that cannot be predicted during initial project scheduling.

So you are in the market for a new EMR and you quickly realize that there are hundreds of companies in this market. How do you choose?

The term “patient engagement” returns 565,000 Google search results in less than four-tenths of a second. In contrast, the term “physician engagement” returns roughly one tenth of the total number of results and most are related to hospital or healthcare management practices.

Open an electronic healthcare record and click on a field. What happens? Underneath the covers of your EHR application, a lot is going on.

What I find stifling is the pace at which meaningful use is proceeding. When you put an entire industry under the MU pressure cooker, the need to meet federal mandates overwhelms anything else.

Cat and dog owners know that pets that chase their tails will eventually catch them – but they won’t stay caught for long. Healthcare providers who manage the exchange of health information understand the feeling.

In the Boston marketplace, Partners Healthcare is is replacing 30 years of self developed software with Epic. Boston Medical Center is replacing Eclipsys (Allscripts) with Epic.

There has been some buzz lately about how interoperability is a non-issue. I beg to differ. With increasing pressure from federal initiatives like Meaningful Use Stage 2, there is growing need for information exchange across the industry.