New poll and miscellaneous

Let's do a new poll, what do you say? Are you going to the HIMSS annual conference in Orlando next month? Answer the poll and also drop me a line if you'd be interested in providing some opinion about what you see. I'll be giving you my own first-person description of the educational sessions and the exhibits. Yours are welcome as well.

Concerning the previous poll: Inside Healthcare Computing is the preferred HIT publication of HIStalk's readers with Healthcare Informatics in second place. IHC isn't perfect, but I look forward to getting my copy and I re-up every year. My other favorite, ADVANCE for HIE, didn't do quite as well. Give it a look. IHC has the inside scoop while ADVANCE has user-written articles that are often meatier than you'll find elsewhere. And, if I may immodestly suggest, HIStalk rounds out this powerful trio with current news and irreverent commentary that's timely and concise.

Joe Blow (I'm guessing that's not the name on his birth certificate) got one of the two trivia questions right. PGI was Patterson, Gorup, Illig when it was incorporated in 1980, becoming Cerner Corporation in 1984.

The usual reminders:

• Enter your e-mail address in the Mailing List box over to your right and you'll get instant e-mail updates when I add material to HIStalk.
• The Search function is a fulltext search of everything ever written on HIStalk. Want to know I've said about a vendor or what news they announced? Put their name in the box to get all the articles in which they were mentioned. Or, search by name or curse word - whatever you like.
• The main page of HIStalk shows the five most recent articles, newest first. But, every article I've written is still here. Click a category under Articles by Category (to the left towards the top of the screen) to see all articles in that category. Or, the Archives links toward the lower left allow you see all articles from a given month.
• Refer the site to a friend, colleague, or the world. The more hits I see, the harder I'm willing to work to bring interesting material to you.
• To the left is a Sponsored By section. Ads are free for awhile, so if you're a vendor type, you can post something there literally in about a minute. Get some exposure and keep me interested in spending much of my free time writing here.

I just realized that HIStalk is now seven months old. The first posting was D-day, June 6, 2003. Stats are smokin': December's page hits are ten times more than July's and growing by over 50% each month (even with the holidays.) Thanks for reading and for the encouragement.