WASHINGTON – The EHR Summit III gathering drew a diverse group of attendees representing interested parties from across the healthcare spectrum. Included were representatives of major insurers such as Wellpoint (Thousand Oaks, California) and Cigna HealthCare (Bloomfield, Connecticut), along with payer intermediaries and disease management companies such as MedConnect.

Electronic health record vendors, of course, were there in force, among them Zixcorp (Plano, Texas), JMJ Technologies (Marietta, Georgia), NextGen (Horsham, Pennsylvania), Cerner (Kansas City, Missouri), WebMD (Elmwood Park, New Jersey) and HealthRamp (New York), which acquired Berdy Medical Systems (Saddle Brook, New Jersey).

Infrastructure vendors such as Hewlett Packard (Palo Alto, California) and Hitachi also were on hand, as were major providers such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, Partners Healthcare System (Boston), Christiana Care Health System (Newark, Delaware), Johns Hopkins Community Physicians (Baltimore), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston), Rush University Medical Center (Chicago) and others.

Consultants from Capgemni, an organization that has helped many hospitals implement EHR systems and is currently involved in the UK National Health Service's massive EHR initiative, also took part. And representatives of the Health Level 7 (Ann Arbor, Michigan) organization, the American Academy of Family Physicians (Leawood, Kansas), the Center for Affordable Quality Healthcare (Washington) and other interested and involved parties also participated.

– Arthur Gasch, Contributing Editor