One of the highlights of the upcoming HIMSS19 Global Conference & Exhibition will be the Developer Innovation Lab, a specialty pavilion designed to help spur innovation in the field of health IT. The lab is run by HIMSS and sponsored by Google Cloud.

"Today, health innovators can create health applications for patients, caregivers, clinicians and practitioners that will operate seamlessly and securely across multiple healthcare platforms and systems," said Christel Anderson, senior director, interoperability initiatives, at HIMSS.

"These advances create the need for vendor-neutral organizations, such as HIMSS, to provide a setting for development aids, validation tools, educational resources, and a collaboration space to ensure this new ecosystem maintains its neutrality and stability, while accelerating innovation and adoption," she said.

Programming for developers

The HIMSS Innovation & Conference Center has launched programming for developers that includes the Developer Innovation Lab at HIMSS19, a developers conference titled Dev4Health, and data validation tools and data sets to help meet the needs of the new healthcare ecosystem.

"Hands-on, immersive, collaborative, organic – that’s the Developer Lab," Anderson explained. "The lab is hosted within Innovation Live on the show floor and is a structured, hands-on experience where you can engage one-on-one with industry leaders, innovators and data scientists who are changing healthcare."

Anderson points to four highlights of the Developers Innovation Lab: the Datathon, 1:1 Lab Time APIs, FHIR and 1:1 Deep Learning.

The Cloud Healthcare Datathon Launcher will offer an opportunity for attendees to engage the healthcare and life sciences community. They can learn how to take advantage of curated healthcare datathons tooling – a self-service model comprising process, scripts and templates that supports datathons on permanently hosted datasets, such as MIMIC/eICU/Medicare, or other private datasets.

"Hands-on, immersive, collaborative, organic – that’s the Developer Lab."

Christel Anderson, HIMSS

The 1:1 Lab Time APIs Meet will allow attendees to meet with technical industry leaders for hands-on learning on AI, neural networks, APIs, app builds, the cloud, FHIR, data sets, machine learning and more, with the goal of letting attendees embrace their inner entrepreneur to dive into the startup realm, Anderson said.

Developers on FHIR

For the FHIR event, attendees can learn how SMART on FHIR’s open source, standards-based technology platform enables innovators to create apps that run seamlessly and securely across the healthcare ecosystem. This session will describe how FHIR, OAuth and OpenID Connect allow healthcare providers and patients to plug apps into popular EHRs, patient portals and clinical data warehouses.

And in the 1:1 Deep Learning section of the lab, discussion will be focused on how predictive modeling with EHR data is anticipated to drive personalized medicine and improve healthcare quality. Attendees can learn about how recent developments in deep learning and artificial neural networks may allow healthcare to address many of today’s challenges.

Anderson has a lot to say when asked what she hopes attendees will take away from the Developer Innovation Lab.

"We debuted the Developer Lab at HIMSS18 to more than 700 attendees, in collaboration with our partner Google Cloud," she explained. "We literally had to tear the walls down to accommodate all of our traffic and changed the physical structure of the booth twice during our time at HIMSS18. This year the lab will have more viewing space, more seating, more 1:1 technical content and will be providing each attendee with our ‘Top 3 Takeaways’ to use once at home."

And those Top 3 Takeaways are: Embrace new open data sources, tooling, data sets and tech stacks that are available; learn about programs that are rapidly changing healthcare such as IHE, FHIR, artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning; and immerse yourself in the next generation of digital apps, sandboxes, data science, developer tools, algorithms and code that is building a new health ecosystem.

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com