3 May 2022 (French Healthcare): Some one hundred speakers, almost 1,000 stands, professional visitors from across the global healthcare industry... The HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) is a can’t-miss event for checking out the latest trends in digital health in the United States and worldwide, connecting with peers, and targeting the needs of the American market. This 60th edition was the first since the pandemic to take place both in person and online. Nonetheless, 30,000 to 40,000 visitors chose to travel to Florida for the five-day conference.
Among them were some one hundred French people, most of whom had joined one of three delegations on “study tours” across the Atlantic. The first group was led by public relations firm Care Insight and consisted of around thirty people, including representatives of Greater Paris University Hospitals (AP-HP) and several startups, such as Tribun Health.
The Swiss organization SwissEnoV had put together a group of around thirty hospital directors, regional health authority managers, hospital board chairs, and French, Belgian, and Swiss doctors.
The third delegation was overseen by Catel, an e-health resources and expertise center. It was composed of around forty professionals, doctors, manufacturers, startups, hospital information system managers, representatives of the French hospitals federation (FHF) and Unicancer, medical software publishers, and economic interest groups operating in the healthcare sector.
Three breakfast meetings and two lunches were organized for the French community.
The HIMSS is a fantastic opportunity for healthcare professionals to talk about the complex issues they are confronted with every day, such as the safe use of patient data, artificial intelligence, or cybersecurity, all of which were major topics at the conference.
This year, a panel was organized at the Global Innovation Hub to spotlight France’s attractiveness as an investment location. The panel featured in the official program of the HIMSS conference in Orlando. Martin Hirsch, Director General of AP-HP (the Paris hospitals network) was a keynote speaker on the panel. He discussed the attractiveness of France’s healthcare industry with Okantis, a French digital technology firm, and Salesforce, which is firmly established in the French healthcare ecosystem. More than 80 people attended the session, including tech giants such as IBM Watson or Amazon Web Services.
This year, also for the first time, three French firms were among the exhibitors: Synapse Medicine and its AI platform designed to ensure the proper use of medicinal products, Chronolife and its connected medical wearables, and Thess Corporate and its smart pill organizer.
“The HIMSS is the biggest medical informatics conference in the world.(...) We are the only French firm to have been named “Best in Klas” this year by Klas Research, an organization known for its reliability and impartiality. This will have a huge impact for us, especially when it comes to entering the American market,” says Jean-François Pomerol, CEO of Tribun Health.
Paris-based firm Tribun Health won the 2022 “Best in Klas” customer satisfaction award for digital pathology in Europe.
A pioneer in the sector, Tribun Health is transforming cancer diagnostics through digital technology and AI. Its solution, CaloPix, replaces the microscope by using data to obtain “a faster and more accurate diagnosis in support of precision medicine,” explains CEO Jean-François Pomerol. Number one in France and Canada, the firm is also present in the rest of Europe and the United States.
CaloPix enables researchers and clinicians to work remotely on a screen. The patient’s sample is placed on a slide, which is then scanned. The result is a file of several gigabytes, consisting of a high-resolution image (x400). The file is then analyzed via a monitor and a network. Besides saving a considerable amount of time, this process provides medical personnel with new information to facilitate diagnosis and therapeutic decision making.
In 2023, the HIMSS will be held in Chicago, Illinois, from April 17 to 21.
