CHICAGO — David E. Garets will lead the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's new research subsidiary as president and chief executive officer, HIMSS announced today. Garets, chairman of the HIMSS board of directors, will resign that position before he assumes his new role on May 1.

As it begins to build the subsidiary, HIMSS may acquire another research company, HIMSS president and CEO H. Stephen Lieber said. "That's one of the options on the table," he said. "There's no deal in place." Lieber said discussions with research firms ranged from joint ventures to acquisition. The final model has yet to be determined, he said, though he hoped that it would be decided by June 1.

David E. Garets

Lieber will become chairman of the new company's board and will continue as well in his current role as the president and CEO of HIMSS.

Garets said his top priority is to build a vibrant organization. "One of the first things we've got to do is get out and talk to both corporate members of HIMSS and CIOs and find out what they need for a good set of information," Garets said.

"Nobody's really doing that," he said. " Everybody's dying for good data."

"Whether it's about computerized provider data entry, practice management, or electronic medical records, providers and vendors alike are hungry for deep research that goes beyond anecdotal information, he said.

"The whole story on IT in the provider space isn't being addressed," Garets said.

Lieber said his greatest hope was to develop accurate, valid and reliable tools to help vendors in their business endeavors and to help providers make the right decisions about their technology investments.

HIMSS, based in Chicago with offices around the country, represents more than 14,000 individual members and some 220 member corporations. While HIMSS is nonprofit, its research subsidiary will be a for-profit entity.Some of its reports will be available free, Garets said, but much of the research would be marketed and sold.

A well-recognized leader in the industry, Garets is executive vice president of Healthlink Inc. He is formerly a hospital CIO and industry analyst. He was a faculty member for executive education courses offered by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and sits on several editorial advisory boards of healthcare industry journals and trade publications.

Garets and Lieber are assembling a management team for the subsidiary and they will announce appointments within the next month, Garets said. He estimated the staff would number 30-40.

Solutions Toolkit*, a HIMSS data mining and Web-based tool designed to serve the business intelligence needs of the healthcare IT industry, will be transferred to the new company. In addition, expanded data collection efforts are already underway to provide an even richer information resource to the provider and vendor communities. The products from this new service will be (1) sales and marketing information for healthcare information technology software firms, computing and networking companies, and IT consulting firms, (2) operations benchmark data and buying decision support information for provider organizations, and (3) comprehensive analytical reports reflecting current market trends or hot topics, mined from the database, that forecast the potential impact of a technology or trend on the market place.

Garets said the research subsidiary, which has not yet been named, will use Web-enabled technology to conduct its research and, in turn, to make it available to end users and vendors.

Garets said he could not resist the opportunity to sit in the "catbird's seat where you really have a good view of this industry. "It's an opportunity to help the industry. I want to do it."