Big draw of over 750 attendees. Good representation of the industry, with primary focus on telehealth, thus plenty of representatives from this sector including in no particular order, Cisco, Sharp, Panasonic, Medtronic, Philips, Honeywell, you get the idea. Of course, loads of others surrounding this space such as VC firms, financial analysts, law firms, consultants, etc. Arguably the most represented group was the wireless telcos, with all the majors represented with the exception of T-Mobile.

Few representatives of the big HIT vendors – looks like they are sticking to their knitting and not extending out into this new market. They may want to begin paying more attention, however, as hospitals are looking to minimize re-admittance rates. Some pretty impressive results were presented on how home health monitoring systems have lowered re-admittance and there are a number of good reasons to link telehealth data from these systems with a patient’s EMR. This is part of Microsoft’s vision for HealthVault (HV) and is reflected in such HV partners as Allscripts and Kryptiq.

BTW, Microsoft was here, Google was not.

The BIG throttle on the market today is lack of CMS support (willingness to fund) telehealth and/or reimburse providers for delivering care via the Internet. A lot of discussions (and complaining) in the halls on this topic. In the closing session, one senior executive of a major medical device supplier stated this market will continue to struggle until CMS opens up its mind (and pocketbook).

Best quote: “The healthcare industry does too much gazing at its navel thinking that its problems are unique when in reality its problems are not that unique and other industry sectors have had to overcome similar challenges.” -Doug Busch, Intel

Best Session: Web 2.0 and Healthcare: Business Prospects for the Next New Thing. While all the young companies presenting during this session were interesting, the two that really have some legs are DNA Direct and PatientsLikeMe. Particularly impressed with PatientsLikeMe – this could be the future for PHRs. I’ll be writing more about them in the future after I’ve had a chance to spend more time with them.

More tomorrow.