“Digital technology can provide a bridge to the healthcare system via sensors, tools, and trackers for people who are living their lives each day,” I explained to the social media team at Philips, which is morphing as an organization to being all digital health, all-the-time. (Here’s what I learned about Philips and digital health in January 2017 after meeting with Jeroen Tas at the CES in Vegas).

Here’s the larger discussion, shared with several of my fellow members of the HIMSS Social Media Ambassador family.

I’ll be meeting with Philips’ leadership at HIMSS, the annual health IT conference that has become a Disneyland for those of us who are committed to leveraging IT to deliver on the Triple Aim — enhance the healthcare experience, drive health outcomes for individuals as communities, and lower per capita health care costs.

This will be my twenty-something’th HIMSS, so I go way back to the pocket-protector days of the conference when materials management, PACS systems for x-ray film, and billing systems were au courant.

This year, the buzz at HIMSS is about population health, the cloud, APIs and FHIR standards for data liquidity, Big Data and analytics, and a sober (and financially meaningful) re-commitment to dealing with cybersecurity — a huge challenge to healthcare CIOs and health consumers alike.

Stay tuned to the Health Populi blog all next week for my HIMSS updates, focusing on consumers’ using health tech for self-care and financial wellness, social determinants of health and health IT (the topic of my talk on Tuesday 21st February at 830 am in Room W307A), and telehealth for bringing providers and consumers together in clinical Kumbaya and shared decision-making.