Preview of #AHIMACon17 – HIM Scene

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I thought it might be interesting to check out the #AHIMACon17 conference hashtag for the AHIMA Annual Convention to get an idea of what the hot topics were going to be going into the annual convention. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much conversation happening on the hashtag yet. Here’s a sample of a few things I found and some of my commentary about each.


I’m excited to hear Viola Davis as well. I’m sure she has some amazing stories. It’s not clear to me her connection to healthcare, but I’m all about hearing the stories of successful people. I hope they let her tell her story and not try to have her be a healthcare speaker. Ironically, the MGMA Annual Conference is happening at the same time as the AHIMA Annual Convention about 45 minutes away. Viola Davis is keynoting both. I’m not sure if they planned this together or if it’s just coincidence. Either way, I guess I get 2 chances to hear Viola, but trying to manage both events is hard.


This tweet from Ciox made me laugh. There’s a lot of things in healthcare that are still stuck in the 80s. As Mr. H from HIStalk likes to say, Healthcare is where old technology goes to die. There’s certainly some modernization that could happen at about every healthcare organization.


This tweet is ironic after the above tweet talking about the need to modernize. I wonder how many in the AHIMA community are familiar with NLP based technology. For those not familiar, NLP stands for natural language processing. It can be used in a variety of ways, but in the AHIMA world it’s most commonly used to analyze medical records and assess if the documentation matches the coding. It’s pretty amazing technology. I also love seeing NLP used on narrative sections of a note to identify granular data elements that could be used to better inform clinical decision support tools. Do many HIM professionals care about this technology? Are they using it? I think I’ll ask when I’m at the event.


I think security will be an extremely hot topic this year. Given HIM’s role in doing release of information (ROI), it’s always had an important role. In fact, they have a pre-conference Privacy & Security Institute that I’ve heard a lot of great things about. I’m hoping to go this year if they let press attend.

Will you be at #AHIMACon17? What do you expect to be the hot topics? Are there sessions you absolutely must attend? Who’s going to throw the best party? I hope to see many of you at the conference!

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About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • John, thank you for covering AHIMA and we hope to see you there! Yes, HIM professionals are very knowledgeable about NLP. It is the foundation for all computer-assisted-coding (CAC) systems and we’re very excited about all the possibilities it holds to transform CDI and coding. Ready to follow #AHIMACon17!

  • Beth,
    I think that’s true of many advanced HIM professionals (those that attend AHIMACon), but do you think it’s true for most HIM professionals?

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