Chalk one up for interoperability – hands-on interoperability. It is one of many gains HIMSS President and CEO H. Stephen Lieber envisions with the opening of the HIMSS Innovation Center in Cleveland, slated for October.

Between the innovation center itself and its accompanying exhibition floor, the complex will occupy a total of 25,000 square feet on the fourth level – the entire top floor – of the Global Center for Health Innovation, which will house other big-name healthcare leaders and charter tenants, among them Cleveland Clinic, GE Healthcare, Johnson Controls, University Hospitals and Philips Healthcare. HIMSS has plans to double the size of the exhibition space by 2016.

The $465 million Global Center for Innovation and newly refurbished convention center is part of a 1 million square-foot campus in the heart of downtown Cleveland.

Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald announced that HIMSS would be an anchor tenant at the Cleveland center earlier today during his annual State of the County address at the City Club in downtown Cleveland.

HIMSS' new center will be home to the Interoperability Showcase, a popular highlight of the HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition. In Cleveland, the Interoperability Showcase will be demonstrating and testing multiple vendor products, day in and day out.

"We’re going to be doing it all the time, not just a few days during the conference," Lieber says. "That introduces new things you can do." It will enable HIMSS to provide much better ongoing information about how products work with one another, he says.

The interoperability showcase will take up about two-thirds of the exhibit space, Lieber says. The second area of the floor will be dedicated to exhibits that are self-guided and interactive, and a smaller third area will be resrved for executive suites.

As Lieber sees it, the HIMSS Innovation Center will become a worldwide hub for health and health IT testing, demonstration, exhibitions and consumer products, including the latest breakthroughs in mobile health devices and distance medicine technology, small conferences and changing themes.

The idea, he says, is to engage.

"We’ve got to reach more than IT folks,” says Lieber, who leads an organization of 52,000 healthcare IT executives. “Getting to others – that is our strategic challenge." By also drawing in department heads, medical specialty organizations, healthcare management groups and others, HIMSS, whose tagline is “cause-based, not-for-profit," has a better chance of effecting change, of "broadening the discussion, adding more people to the convrsation" Lieber says.

The sentiment echoes what Lieber said two years ago when HIMSS had plans to anchor a similar project in Nashville.

"The concept here is that it gives us the ability to reach an audience we wouldn't ordinarily reach." Lieber said back in 2010. And that has not changed, he says today.

"It’s a very comparable concept," Lieber says. "The biggest difference is location, not concept."