Last week the Altera Digital Health team joined 28,000 attendees from 88 countries in Las Vegas, Nevada, for HIMSS25. With more than 600 educational sessions and nearly one thousand exhibitors, the HIMSS conference offers a unique opportunity to have critical conversations about the evolution of healthcare and technology’s role in it.

Whether you attended HIMSS yourself or engaged with our content from afar, here are some highlights we’re keeping top of mind.

Reimagining healthcare experiences

Ben Scharfe, Executive Vice President, Artificial Intelligence (AI), kicked things off by sharing Altera’s vision for the future of healthcare, underpinned by one core tenet: We measure our success by your outcomes. As we endeavor to better enable clinicians, empower patients and transform healthcare organizations, addressing our clients’ top challenges will drive the development and delivery of all our solutions and services.

Many of these challenges and ways to solve them came up in conversations throughout the week. There was a lot of excitement at HIMSS about the potential for ambient listening to alleviate burnout by reducing documentation burdens for clinicians. Attendees saw this in action in the Microsoft booth during a live demonstration of TouchWorks Note+ from Dr. Bob Taylor, Chief Product Strategist. Dr. Taylor showed how ambient listening can capture important details from patient–provider interactions and create structured notes from unstructured data in a matter of seconds.

Similarly, clients and other booth visitors were interested in discussing ways to remove friction from business office processes. John Randzo, Senior Manager for Sunrise™ Solutions Management, teased the highly anticipated release of Sunrise 25.1, sharing several workflow enhancements that will reduce clicks and prioritize tasks for staff members so they can focus on those that bring the greatest value to the organization. Sunrise clients were also eager to learn more about additional features and tools to come in the next major release, including the Sunrise™ CarePath patient portal.

Unlocking the full power of data—for clinical and non-clinical use cases—was another recurring theme. Kevin Ritter, Executive Vice President, CareInMotion, spoke at length about the importance of aggregating data and bringing it to the right person at the right time to improve decision-making, both at the point of care and at the population health level. On the revenue cycle side, Matt Maynard and Jigna Patidar from our Ventus team shared how analytics and visualizations can help financial leaders gain a quick, clear picture of their organizations’ financial health.

With more industry attention on the flexibility, reliability and security cloud hosting offers, Mark Bruno, Executive Vice President, Paragon®, provided an update on Paragon Denali after first unveiling it at HIMSS24. Likewise, Chris Dezio and Tim O’Brien from our Hosting team underscored the importance of optimizing the security, performance and availability of electronic health records (EHRs) in the wake of major incidents reported across the industry in 2024. Jackie Matthews from our Managed Services arm and Kristi Houssiere from Altera partner Beazley Security also provided insights on ways clients can support employees with good security controls, such as addressing business email compromise risk.

Finally, potential regulatory shifts overlayed many of these conversations. Leigh Burchell, Vice President, Policy and Public Affairs, and current chair of the Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA), joined fellow EHRA leaders for a panel session on laws and regulations related to AI development. In this discussion and in media interviews, Leigh underscored how inconsistencies between federal and state regulations create challenges for developers and, in turn, healthcare organizations that want to leverage new technologies to improve care delivery, financial performance and operational efficiency.

Reaching the summit together

From all our conversations at HIMSS, it’s clear that change is one of the only constants in this industry. No matter what challenges lie ahead, Altera is committed to guiding clients along the path to better healthcare at every turn.

Looking for more opportunities to connect with Altera in person following HIMSS? Save the date for HCTC, December 2–4, 2025, in San Diego, California. Clients can learn more here!