room 24 hours a day watching C-SPAN. So, HIMSS has really
taken a leadership role in keeping people informed about
what’s going on, what it means and how the industry should
react.”
Adds Roberts, “The economic stimulus — and meaningful
use, in particular — is probably the biggest legislative event
in the history of our organization. So, we went into overdrive
trying to make sure we prepared our members with education
and training. It’s been one of the biggest coordinated efforts
in the history of HIMSS.”
Cause-Based Care
Understanding HIMSS’ response to meaningful use requires
first understanding its history.
Established in 1961 as the Hospital Management Systems
Society, HIMSS represents more than 35,000 individual
members, 520 corporate members and more than 120 non-profit organization members. Originally founded as a professional society for hospital administrators, it expanded its
focus to health IT in 1986 and merged with CPRI-HOST, a
health care association dedicated to EHRs, in 2002.
That was a significant moment in the history of HIMSS,
according to President and CEO H. Stephen Lieber, CAE, who
says HIMSS had to reinvent itself in order to serve its original
stakeholders — individual members — and its new ones: corporate members.
“Once you start down a path like that, where you are serv-
ing two very different kinds of members, your thinking starts
to change,” Lieber says. “Rather than trying to allocate our
resources and split them up serving individual, nonprofit and
company members, it liberated us to focus on the reasons
why organizations and individuals work in the health care sec-
tor, and on what technology can do within health care.”
Through a series of mergers and acquisitions like that with
CPRI-HOST, HIMSS evolved into what it now calls a “cause-
based organization.”
“We have, in some respects, redefined ourselves,” Lieber
continues. “We are not designing ourselves to improve the
companies that operate in the space, as a trade association
might, nor is the improvement of our members’ professional
status our primary objective. Our mission is to help our mem-
bers improve health care through the best use of information
technology.”
Anyone who’s skeptical about the impact of IT on health
care should consider the influence of technology on other
industries. “The kind of thing HIMSS is advocating in health
care is what you already enjoy in every other aspect of your
life,” says Greenspun, an advisory member of the HIMSS
board and co-author of Reengineering Health Care: A Mani-
festo for Radically Rethinking Health Care Delivery. “Do you
use OpenTable to make restaurant reservations? Yes, so why
don’t more of us have online scheduling for appointments
with our doctor? Can you use any ATM in the world to get
access to local currency? Yes, so why can’t we walk into a
drug store in another city and get access to our prescriptions?
Can you show up at an airline kiosk and swipe your credit
card to magically access everything about your trip? Yes, so
why do you have to fill out all the same forms every time you
go from a hospital to a doctor’s office to a specialist? Health
care is lagging other industries by over a decade in how it
handles information, even though it’s an incredibly informa-
tion-intensive industry.”
Thanks to health IT, clinicians in the future will be able to
monitor their patients’ diet and exercise habits while patients
will receive automatic reminders when it’s time for a vaccina-
tion or colonoscopy.
“Health care is really the last major industry that has
taken advantage of technology.” Roberts says. “A few years
