Health-E Law Podcast Ep. 8
What We Heard at HIMSS 2024 with Michael Orlando & Carolyn Metnick
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Listen to the podcast released April 18, 2024 here:
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Welcome to Health-e Law, Sheppard Mullin's podcast exploring the fascinating health-tech topics and trends of the day. In this episode, Sheppard Mullin partners Carolyn Metnick and Michael Orlando join Phil Kim to discuss the firm’s experience at HIMSS Global Health Conference 2024 in Orlando. The conference is one of the leading health IT educational gatherings and draws visionary CIOs, top-level executives, dedicated healthcare providers, and health IT professionals to cover the latest trends in digital health, including AI and cybersecurity.
About Carolyn Metnick
Carolyn Metnick is a partner in Sheppard Mullin’s Corporate Practice Group in the firm's Chicago office and a member of the Healthcare and Privacy & Cybersecurity Teams.
Carolyn represents a range of healthcare industry clients, including hospitals and health systems, physician organizations and digital health companies. She advises on healthcare regulatory and transactional matters, focusing on health information privacy and security.
Carolyn advises clients on a range of privacy and security laws, including HIPAA and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). She also counsels businesses in data breach investigations and compliance with federal and state breach notification laws. Carolyn is a Certified Information Privacy Professional/United States (CIPP/US) and a Certified Information Privacy Professional/Europe (CIPP/E).
Carolyn also represents healthcare industry clients in transactional matters, guiding clients through joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and advising on healthcare regulatory issues. Her background as a former litigator helps inform her transactional work.
About Michael Orlando
Michael Orlando is a corporate and intellectual property transactions partner in the firm's San Diego (Del Mar) office. He is Co-Team Leader of the firm's Technology Transactions Team, and a member of the Life Sciences and Digital Health teams. He founded a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business prior to attending law school, and worked at a publicly-traded biotechnology company on an in-house secondment, and uses that experience in bringing a practical, business-oriented approach to his engagements.
For over 20 years he has been assisting innovators, cutting-edge technology companies and other organizations develop, acquire, sell, and commercialize intellectual property assets, including technology licensing, commercial agreements, strategic partnerships, research, development and collaboration contracts, manufacturing and supply arrangements, outsourcing, and corporate transactions.
About Phil Kim
A partner in the Corporate and Securities Practice Group in Sheppard Mullin's Dallas office and co-lead of its Digital Health Team, Phil Kim has a number of clients in digital health. He has assisted multinational technology companies entering the digital health space with various service and collaboration agreements for their wearable technology, along with global digital health companies bolstering their platform in the behavioral health space. He also assists public medical device, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical companies, as well as the investment banks that serve as underwriters in public securities offerings for those companies.
Phil also assists various healthcare companies on transactional and regulatory matters. He counsels healthcare systems, hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, physician groups, home health providers, and other healthcare companies on the buy- and sell-side of mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and operational matters, which include regulatory, licensure, contractual, and administrative issues. Phil regularly advises clients on matters related to healthcare compliance, including liability exposure, the Stark law, anti-kickback statutes, and HIPAA/HITECH privacy issues. He also provides counsel on state and federal laws, business structuring formation, employment issues, and involving government agencies, including state and federal agencies.
Transcript:
Phil Kim:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another special episode of Healthy Law. My name is Phil Kim. I'm a partner in the Dallas office for Sheppard Mullin. And I'm joined today by our two guests, Mike Orlando, one of my partners from the San Diego office, as well as Carolyn Metnick, our partner from our Chicago office. Both Mike and Carolyn were able to attend the HIMSS 2024 Global Health Conference in Orlando, and we wanted to provide you all with a recap. How are you both doing?
Carolyn Metnick:
Doing well, Phil. Thank you. Thanks for having us. This is Mike's first podcast. I'm not going to point it out. Well, I guess I just did. But I'm happy to be participating in it with him.
Mike Orlando:
Thanks for throwing me under the bus. Yeah, thanks for having us, Phil.
Phil Kim:
Well without further ado, Mike, how is HIMSS different this year from past years?
Mike Orlando:
I think the HIMSS mojo was back this year. Really, it was a little bit back to the normal HIMSS that I was used to. There was a definite change right after the pandemic, and the attendance was affected at this conference as well as a lot of conferences. And it really was busy this year. And there were a lot of vendors. There was a lot of traffic on the showroom floor. There was tons of sessions, and they were all well-intended. Some of them were like standing room only that I saw; lots of crowds around the floor room presentations that people were doing at their booths. And really exciting to see. I think everyone was excited. That's what I heard from everyone in the conference. I don't know if Carolyn had a different perspective on that, but I think there was 30,000 or something people I heard this year, so it felt crowded.
Carolyn Metnick:
Yeah, I was just going to add, this was my first time attending HIMSS. And the only point of reference I have, interestingly, is Vive, because Vive happened about a week or two before. And Vive was smaller, but it prepared me for HIMSS, which was overwhelming. The showroom floor was huge, packed. You could easily get lost. But I was really impressed and it was really exciting to see some of the new innovation and just the different products. I've spent time negotiating with many of these vendors on behalf of clients. And to be able to see some of these products and understand the offerings was really fun for me. That was the part that I enjoyed the most, quite frankly, just walking around the floor and talking to the vendors and learning more about their offerings. And it was just great.
Mike Orlando:
This year, there was a new area for the first time called the Digital Health Park, that was specific to digital health technology vendors, assembled in one place. And I was excited to see that they announced it. I was excited to see what that was going to look like. And there's digital health companies throughout the whole conference, on the whole showroom floor. But they additionally added this piece on there for the digital health category. And it was good, first of all, just to see that there was a digital health category by itself being recognized separate from other healthcare technologies and IT, by HIMSS.
And my impression of it though was it was a first attempt at trying to really segment that away from the other types of IT. And most of it was early stage digital health companies that had their booths all in this one area. It wasn't really a park. I was imagining that it was going to be more like some of the other technology areas that they have set up on the HIMSS showroom floor, like they have an interoperability showcase area where they had companies that were displaying how their technologies worked and everything, kind of like Carolyn was mentioning. But the digital health one didn't have something like that.
So I think it's the first year for that to be at HIMSS. And I'm sure it's going to grow from here and maybe they'll have more features and things later in next year’s. But it was at least good to see that digital health was recognized as a separate category and was timely, given that we had formed our digital health team at Sheppard Mullin last year. And we're all part of that digital health team at the firm, and so I was glad to see that.
Phil Kim:
That's great. Yeah, with the influx of health tech at the conference and digital health generally, were there any other major themes at the conference that you noticed?
Carolyn Metnick:
Yeah, I mean, AI was very prominent. I mean, that was the primary theme as far as from my perspective. Many of the products that were offered and showcased, they incorporated AI. Vendors had different case studies and illustrations that they were speaking about in the presentations. I missed a lot of the presentations, unfortunately. But AI was a common theme, certainly in the plenaries. And even if you look through the agenda, it's just one after another. Everybody wanted talk about AI. And many of the offerings really involved AI, so that was really fun. Mike, do you agree?
Mike Orlando:
I agree totally. It was the biggest thing, for sure. The sessions focused a lot on AI. And I had the opportunity to go to the first day of HIMSS, where they have the special sessions before the conference begins. And there was an AI forum, and that was really good to see and learn about what people are doing in the AI space. There was a theme this year, I think, around AI though that was a little different than in the past. Last year, I feel like with the introduction of generative AI, there was a lot of excitement around AI and how it can we be used and the future, and speculation about how it's going to be used. And obviously that's really exciting. But this year, I think people had more of a grounded approach and thoughts around how they use AI in their organizations.
And so there was a lot of discussion in the panels I saw by CIOs talking about the challenges of evaluating those technologies, integrating them, finding budgets for them, and not adding to the problems that the technology puts on the staff at the hospitals. There was less talk, I think, about those types of future innovations and more about the practical, real world examples and use cases, like AI and clinical documentation to alleviate the burnout issue, and streamlining revenue cycle management. A little bit less, I'd say, and more caution around clinical decisions or tools, even though there are definitely those around. But I think there was a little bit of more caution on the use of AI this year. I would say more cautious optimism, doing it right, doing it safely, was the biggest theme that I saw around AI.
Carolyn Metnick:
And that makes sense. I mean, we're in a very different spot than we were a year ago, and the landscape is changing rapidly. So when you say that in the past it was more speculative, I think that makes sense to me. I mean, now everybody is using AI to some extent, whether it's ChatGPT, or we're all more familiar with it. And providers have started incorporating it, I think, more consistently, or at least exploring it. So there certainly were more case studies and illustrations and real life examples. Certainly the Scribe products, they seem quite commonplace.
Another theme that was quite prominent, and again, AI definitely was the primary theme, but health equity plays in nicely with AI. That was another theme that we saw, and how certain AI products can help address disparities. I mean, we know that health equity is a real problem and that certain products can propagate bias, but there was also this theme woven throughout our time there that was like, "Well, how can AI really help address disparities and improve health equity?" And different products had different ways of doing that. I mean, even the Scribe products, some of them offer solutions that help address inequity by pre-populating certain information that may not otherwise get into the record that relates to other information that's healthcare-focused, but not as specific to why the patient's presenting, if you will, more kind of background information, like what communities are they coming from. And so that was a theme that I saw. I don't know if you would agree, Mike.
Mike Orlando:
Yeah, there's several themes that I think are common at all of the HIMSS events and sessions: cybersecurity, health equity, patient engagement.
Carolyn Metnick:
Interoperability.
Mike Orlando:
Interoperability, yeah, exactly. Those are all themes. There's too many sessions to attend. Like you said, it's really overwhelming. I really wanted to focus on the AI, because that was the most exciting for me as a technology transactions attorney. The cybersecurity was another one where I attended some things. And that was a big trend, I think also. And it's also related to AI. There was a lot of talk about AI and machine learning to identify issues before the analysts can detect whether there's vulnerabilities.
And there was a lot of talk about the Change Healthcare cyberattack and cybersecurity and how there needs to be more funding for cybersecurity, which I'm surprised to hear people talk about that still. I feel like that was an issue several years ago, where the mentality changed from, "Hey, this is a burdensome cost for cybersecurity," and now we need to change to focus on, "This is a necessity for our business survival." And it seemed like that message still is not getting across to all the healthcare organizations, which it surprised me when I heard some of the panels and still having issues with budgets for that, but saying there has to be an increased cost allocated in the budget for this because you see how impactful these types of attacks are on the whole healthcare ecosystem.
Phil Kim:
Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of funding available out there. On a related note, do you have any other examples of some of the new innovations you saw this year that impressed you both?
Carolyn Metnick:
I can talk about the puppies and camels that were there. Actually, no, I didn't even see them, but apparently there was a puppy park. And one of the vendors had camels, so I heard. I think there was also ... Mike, maybe I'm mixing this up with Vive, but was there a running robot?
Mike Orlando:
Yeah. So people were talking about the Boston Dynamics robot being there. And I went over and it was too late, apparently. I missed it, but there was chatter about that being there. And I wanted to see it in person, but I missed it. So I'm going to have to catch that in another event. But yeah, I really wanted to see that.
There's a lot of innovations there at HIMSS, and it's so overwhelming. And it's hard to really focus on and really get a grasp for what things are really new and exciting. I think as technologists and technology transaction attorneys in the practice at Sheppard Mullin, we see a lot of these technology vendors already, like Carolyn mentioned, because we're representing either vendors of the healthcare systems or medical device companies. And we see that in our procurement or commercialization assistance we provide to companies, but maybe there's a bias because of that. So I'm really looking for things that are really exciting or things mainly that I haven't seen before, frankly.
And I'd say that the one thing that kind of excited me when I saw it was there was a few optical imaging technologies for ophthalmology that I personally really like, because before law, I was actually pre-med and I thought I was going to be an ophthalmologist; probably like a lot of us, we thought we were going to be doctors and we turned to law. And so I was focused on that. And there was a really cool thing in there about how imaging of the eye and some of these technologies, including some AI imaging technologies now, are like a window to your whole body or the eye being the window to your overall health, and providing this image data so that we can use it for non-invasive diagnosis of significant health risks like strokes and heart disease and Alzheimer's disease.
And it was really interesting to think about how technology is not only helping us with our overall health, but also changing the business model for healthcare delivery and patient care. I was listening to one of the companies say that you're going to be able to go to your eye exam and they're going to do a scan of your eyeball. And they're going to then be able to tell you if you're at risk for diabetes or heart disease. So I think about not going to your doctor for that, but going to your optometrist to get your health checked out. So I think that was really cool and something that's actually really close to being implemented.
Carolyn Metnick:
That is really cool. Yeah, I mean, I can't say that I found a solution that was particularly exciting to me. They were all very exciting. But the HIPAA nerd in me had a lot of fun going over to HITRUST and spending some time with their folks over there trying to understand the differences in their certification. I mean, I actually had some questions that were on my mind. So the folks at HITRUST were very generous in explaining the different assessment options to me and the differences, which was actually very helpful. So it was a productive few days.
Mike Orlando:
Yeah. And I'd say maybe the most exciting part of the showroom floor that I saw was the karaoke guy. I forget what company it was, but that was his thing. He was singing karaoke songs by himself over there, trying to get people to join him in his booth. So I thought that was really fun.
Carolyn Metnick:
I missed that. I like karaoke. So I don't know. I feel like I would like that.
Mike Orlando:
Yeah, next time, look out for karaoke guy.
Phil Kim:
Well, it sounds like you both learned a lot and had a lot of fun doing it, so that's great. And I really appreciate both of you providing your insight and thoughts and recapping what you gleaned from your time at HIMSS. So until next time, we will talk to you all on the next edition of the Healthy Law podcast. Thank you for joining.
Carolyn Metnick:
Thanks for having us, Phil. Thank you, Mike.
Mike Orlando:
Yeah, thank you.
Phil Kim:
That is it for us here today. We will see you next time, unless you need us in the meantime.
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