The debut of HIMSS' mini-conference HIT X.0 drew hundreds of attendees to a keynote featuring Aneesh Chopra, U.S. technology czar, and John Glaser, CEO of the Health Services Business Unit at Siemens.

The two experts hosted an interactive session where attendees were encouraged to use phones and computers to tweet their questions and comments for display live on large panel screens onstage.

The session, titled "A Glimpse at Tomorrow's Technology Today," was complete with jovial interchange by the speakers and loud music, charging attendees to appreciate the cutting edge they are walking as technological pioneers.

Chopra gave his aerial view of the nation's technological landscape, explaining how it will affect the healthcare sector. The cloud is a key component Chopra predicts will migrate across all sectors of the U.S. economy.

"The cloud is positioned to play a big part in the future of healthcare," Chopra said. He predicted that 20 percent of U.S. IT spending would move to the cloud in the near future.

Chopra also noted the expansion of broadband to include almost all Americans and social networking as key components of the massive change the nation faces.

Glaser said technological advances come in waves that fundamentally alter society. First, it was the mainframe, and then the Internet. The current wave is "nearly ubiquitous computing."

"Everything and anything that can be networked is networked," he said. The result is a vast and stunning amount of data, and people creating ways to sort through the noise.

Glaser also said social networking will be key. "Being a member of a community is a fundamental part of human activity; it always has been, and it always will be," he said. Nowadays, with social networking, people don't have to physically be together anymore to form a community. "Something big is going down, and it will alter society in a fundamental way," Glaser said.