Attendees to this week's HIMSS Virtual Conference and Expo will have no less than 23 education sessions at their fingertips. In the age of meaningful use, it's no surprise the majority of these focus on EHR adoption, innovation and usability.

Wednesday's education sessions are divided into three tracks:

Track one - "Facilitating Health IT Adoption and Utilization"
Track two - "Principle and Practice of Usability and Human-Computer Interfaces"
Track three - "Primer for Professionals: An Overview of the US Health IT System."

Track one leads off with three user interface design experts commenting on applying usability to technology design. The session will focus on incorporating a feedback loop and marrying usability to demonstrating meaningful use. "Applying Usability and User-Centered Design Methodologies to Achieve Meaningful Use" starts at 10:00AM CST.

Officials from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene will share their wisdom in "Implementation Best Practices from a New York City Community EHR Project" at 2:30PM CST. The lessons learned will be scaled for small and large practices and will include a focus on post go-live support.

Wednesday's track two sessions include "The Roadmap to EMR Adoption and IT Optimization," in which the need for meaningful information-systems assessment will be highlighted, and "Patient Identity Integrity: Understanding the Impact on the Real World." This latter session will present a case study of a database encompassing 16 million real patients' identities.

Rounding out Wednesday's EHR focus are track two sessions such as"Usability Methods to Improve EMRs," at 2:30PM CST and "Preparing for EHR Take-OFF: How to Find and Fix the Hidden Resistance Pockets in Your Organization" at 3:30PM CST.

Track three will shed a policy light on clinical issues. HIMSS officials including David Roberts, vice president of Government Relations, and Patricia Wise, vice president of Healthcare Information Systems will present sessions on healthcare reform and the regulatory impact to healthcare, respectively. The policy track closes out appropriately with a 2:30PM CST session titled, "Collaboration Across the Disciplines Through Clinical Informatics" to be presented by HIMSS Vice President, Informatics, Joyce Sensmeier.

Be sure to visit http://www.himssvirtual.org/education.asp for information on all sessions this week.