It’s been just under a year since McKesson and Change Healthcare Holdings officially established Change Healthcare as its own new health IT vendor — meaning that this year’s HIMSS conference is technically the company’s first.

Change CEO Neil de Crescenzo pointed to the company’s investments in artificial intelligence, blockchain, interoperability, patient experience and revenue cycle management as examples of the direction it’s headed in the future.

Blockchain, for instance, made a big splash at HIMSS17 last year in Orlando and in the time since Change unveiled its Intelligent Healthcare Network built using the digital ledger technology to enable claims management.

“We are concurrently exploring other Blockchain use cases, such as managing the patient encounter across the entire health system all the way through to payment,” de Crescenzo said.

Change also intends to announce at HIMSS18 the formal availability of InterQual Auto Review, after having demonstrated an early version back at HIMSS17 — when it was still operating under the McKesson brand name. InterQual Auto Review actually manifested from a partnership with the National Decision Support Company, which Change acquired in mid-January, 2018. The InterQual software pulls data from otherwise disparate sources, including EHRs, to integrate evidence-based medicine capabilities into clinician’s workflow.

On the cloud computing front, Change is working with both Google Cloud and Zebra Medical Vision to incorporate AI into its enterprise imaging workflows, he added.

Also, in mid-December of 2017, Change partnered with analytics and integration specialist Tibco Software to apply Tibco business intelligence tools into healthcare workflows.

“Everyone will be talking about innovative technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing and data analytics,” de Crescenzo said of HIMSS18. “You’ll see a lot of use cases — and a lot of hype.”

And this being Change’s first official HIMSS health IT conference, de Crescenzo has another mission in mind.

“Our top priority,” he said, “is to give attendees a clear idea of who we are.”  

Change Healthcare is located in Booth 4202.

Twitter: SullyHIT
Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com