I attended the annual conference of the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in Orlando, Florida. Boasting 38,828 attendees, HIMSS is the largest health IT show in the country.

Attending educational sessions and touring the mile-long exhibit floor, one could identify the concerns and priorities of providers and vendors. Key drivers discussed included accountable care, big data and business and clinical intelligence; many vendors made claims of “population health” solutions, if they could address even a small part of a customer’s needs.

I believe the industry will have a bit of a shakeout as the market identifies those vendors that deliver the data control, broad analytics and care solutions needed to succeed in population health.Two emerging themes, in particular, caught my interest—an emphasis on patient engagement and a gap separating population-health pioneers and vendors from the market majority.

In presentations and through Twitter (HIMSS reported 63,839 tweets during the show) attendees discussed various aspects of patient engagement. One thread discussed the provision of more information—presenting quality and cost delivered by organizations—to enable and prompt consumers to make better healthcare decisions. Another thread discussed the need to support family caregivers—the least expensive healthcare providers we have. What struck me is the emerging expectation that consumers must shoulder the twin burdens of making appropriate cost/quality decisions and an increased reliance on self-management or family care for their health. For a population that has looked to providers to make healthcare decisions and deliver care, this change may run into resistance—and, according to a HIMSS Leadership Survey, only one percent of organizations identify “Consumer Healthcare Solutions” as a top IT priority over the next two years.

While signage on the exhibit floor promoted solutions for population health and advanced analytics as the solutions de jour, the topics of many educational sessions communicated a different place on the path to value-based care. A few sessions presented the learning of accountable care organization (ACO) pioneers. Many others, however, discussed other priorities—Meaningful Use, quality measures, health information exchange, electronic health records, HIPAA compliance and ICD-10 transition. This is consistent with the HIMSS Leadership Survey which identified “Achieve Meaningful Use” (25%), “Optimize Use of Current Systems” (19%) and “Complete ICD-10 Conversion” (16%) as three of the top four IT priorities over the next two years. “IT Support for Risk-Based Contracting” placed in a distant sixth place with only 3% of organizations naming it a priority.

What this shows is that healthcare delivery organizations have more on their plates than a transition to value-based care. When they have the capacity to make that transition, and make the IT investments necessary to support population health, a role will exist for analysts and vendors and pioneers to help guide that transition. As one presenter stated, “the success or failure of a nationwide transition to value- based care hinges on the ability of hundreds of ACOs to learn very quickly from others.”