A British colleague tried summing it up. "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Was HIMSS 2010 really that subdued?

A week or so ago, I predicted that the event would be extremely sober, and that while the U.S. healthcare market is in a dramatic state of flux, this wouldn't necessarily translate to the exhibition and conference halls. To a large extent, this was borne out by much that went on in Atlanta. I was inspired by David Blumenthal's presentation, but by and large the rest of the sessions left me cold.

As for my fellow vendors, it's pretty clear where resources - from developers to marketeers - are being focused. In fact it was pretty much impossible to escape the shadow of 'meaningful use', wherever you looked. And while you can't blame suppliers for talking up their chances in this space with so much money available, there was a strong sense of businesses abandoning innovation for the checklist, ticking off criteria and broadcasting the fact to anyone prepared to listen.

A new survey confirms this outlook. The 21st Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey shows that some 47 percent of hospitals and providers will definitely increase their operating budgets, and that in 49 percent of cases this is in order to meet the requirements for financial incentives promised by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
 Perhaps most striking of all,  Meaningful Use Criteria was the top IT priority, with 42 percent signalling that this was their area of focus. 

Perhaps it's time to be realistic here. This is innovation being driven government, and it might not be such a bad thing. Bear with me. Perhaps the first phase of meaningful use is best seen as a platform, or the foundation point where we agree the common framework upon which innovation will flourish. And perhaps a bit of 'boring' isn't such a bad thing. One step at a time rather than two steps forward and one step back.

But what you cannot dispute is the sheer appetite for change. When David Blumenthal said that information is the lifeblood of medicine, while IT  is its circulatory system, nobody blinked. When you spoke to delegates, vendors, CIOs and clinicians almost every person, without exception, said that they expected EHR running on interoperable systems to become the norm in the next five years.

Maybe that's an achievement in itself. We've stopped arguing about whether or not EHR will happen. It will. And now that there's a lot less shouting and a lot more doing, we call it dull. Perhaps, instead, we should count our blessings.