Jerry Fahrni

I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my flight. I’m on my way to Orlando for Innovations ’10 for Healthcare IT. Innovations is an annual conference put on by Siemens, who promote themselves as “ a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, and operates in the industry, energy and healthcare sectors.” The hospital where I work uses several products from Siemens including Siemens Pharmacy, Siemens Medication Administration Check (MKA) and Soarian, which is their clinical information system for physicians and nurses, and the foundation for their CPOE system.

Like many conferences, Innovations offers an opportunity for like-minded professionals to gather and get the latest scoop on cutting edge practices. And for me it’s all about finding the people and facilities that do things better than us and trying to put that information to work for me when I get back to the hospital. Although it doesn’t always work out the way I planned, attending is still a good idea.

This will be my third Innovations meeting and the two tracks that are of most interest to me are usually the Medication Safety and Pharmacy tracks; shocking, right? This year however, I’ve decided to expand my scope a little and investigate a couple of other tracks, including Soarian Analytics/Decision Support Solutions and Interfacing & Integration. The titles for the breakout sessions in these tracks look intriguing and I’m hoping to find a diamond in the rough.

In addition to deviating from my normal track routine I am presenting at Innovations for the first time ever. My presentation, “How Rounds Reports and Mobile Computing Support the Roles of the Clinical Pharmacist”, covers a fairly broad range of topics. I actually submitted two separate presentations for consideration, one on creating reports for rounds (UDA in Siemens speak) and one on mobile computing, but Siemens didn’t have room for both, so rather than scrap one they asked me to consolidate them into a single presentation. I think that worked out better anyway. My presentation is on Tuesday, August 10 from 11:00 a.m. til noon. Wish me luck as I haven’t had much presentation practice over the past several years. I will post the slides on slideshare following the presentation.

As an FYI, my traveling gear of choice for this conference:

1. Dell Latitude XT2 tablet (lesson learned from the Nashville trip) – will be used to get a little work done, mark-up presentation slides during various sessions, and of course blogging during Innovations.
2. iPad – will be used for entertainment, i.e. movies, music and games, reading PDFs of which I downloaded last night and as a prop for my presentation that includes several slides featuring the iPad and Citrix accessing our pharmacy system.
3. iPhone – used mostly as an MP3 player and backup to the DROID.
4. DROID – used primarily for social media and email. Oh and to make calls on. Go figure.