Microsoft CEO Ballmer Opens HIMSS 2007

February 27, 2007 | NEW ORLEANS -- Just days after the close of Mardi Gras, the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference & Exhibition got under full swing yesterday with more than 23,000 attendees. That’s down slightly from 24,000 last year, but very welcome in this city struggling to revive from Katrina. Sunday’s stormy weather in the Midwest and Northeast caused many flight delays and organizers hope a few delayed travelers will arrive and edge up attendance today.

No matter. HIMSS 2007 is a massive conference. There are nearly 900 exhibiting companies, including 260 first-timers, more than 300 educational sessions, and interoperability showcase in which 48 applications from 37 vendors are sharing information. All of this is easily swallowed by the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center’s 3 million square feet.

Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer delivered the opening keynote painting a broad picture of industry opportunity and Microsoft’s growing ambition in Health IT. The growing glut of medical information, combined with its paper-bound legacy, provides a “stunning opportunity” for information technology to improve health and contain costs, he said, perhaps not a new message for most.

The industry is too big for any one company to produce all its Health IT needs, said Ballmer. Emerging technologies such as natural language processing would be needed to mine the growing cache of clinical and consumer data, soon to be joined by imaging and genomic data. Service oriented architectures would be more important to healthcare than any other industry, he argued.

He cited examples in the financial industry where modeling helps analysts make complicated decisions they would not otherwise be able to. Tools such as these are even more important for healthcare, he said, and announced that Microsoft had just acquired MedStory, which has an intelligent search engine for health and science. This is Microsoft’s second healthcare-related acquisition in the past few months; it also bought Azyxxi, a maker of software designed to retrieve and display patient information from many sources.

Healthcare is so big and important, said Ballmer, that Microsoft is organizing its healthcare efforts differently than its usual approach of small teams focusing on vertical opportunities. He lamented that, “Healthcare is the single largest industry in the world but we don’t see standardization in software.” He announced that the company would devote more resources en mass to healthcare.

It was vintage Ballmer, whose intense, can-do cheerleading sometime omits details but often portends the strength with which Microsoft will pursue a market. Indeed, during a video presented by Ballmer, a Microsoft employee says, “[we have] humility about healthcare, but want to go fast anyway.” Ballmer broadly described Microsoft healthcare framework and predicted IT would eventually consumerize healthcare as it has many other industries.

Email John Russell.

Subscribe to Digital HealthCare & Productivity.