It should not be surprising that Hal Wolf, Chief Executive Officer of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), is fitness-focused. In his house, the mission begins at sunup.
“My wife and I compare our Oura daily,” he recently said. “How did you sleep? How’s your heart rhythm? We’re finding the features and working through them.”
The unashamedly candid CEO—“I can get criticized for it, but I believe in absolute transparency”—has been leading HIMSS since 2017, trying to square the circles in a sprawling industry that’s consistently in need of helping hands. “I have not yet been in a healthcare system that has an abundance of nurses and physicians available to them,” he said. “We don't have enough healthcare workers, and we won't be able to take care of the demand in this aging population that is all around us. So this is where digital health transformation has to occur.”
The transformation is being driven by AI, which has gone from novelty to necessity in just three years. “Now it's substantive. Now there are competing applications. Now we're learning how to use it, how to measure it,” Wolf said.
That said, Wolf estimates that only five to seven percent of hospital systems are using AI effectively, meaning there’s ample room to continue innovating, even from the moment a patient checks in, to help create a care plan. “When someone walks to the front desk and says their right arm is hurting, the staff collects the information by typing it into a form. They ask a couple of questions, such as “Who’s your primary care doctor? Who’s your insurance company? Are you on managed care? Is this new? What other ailments do you have? What other prescriptions do you have?” They must ask those questions if they don’t have that information readily available. That data feeds into new algorithms on the AI side.”
The holistic view of the medical treatment experience aligns with Wolf’s view of what HIMSS stands for and how it operates. Nothing, he says, happens in isolation. “One of the great strengths of HIMSS is not just what you do,” he said in 2024, “but how you do it and how is that embraced by government, and what are the policies that are coming that might impact both the patient level, the operational level and also the innovation level?”
Like his Oura ring, Wolf is constantly monitoring every possible data point and every connection. He stresses that HIMSS is an open book, with transparency at the forefront of everything he and his company does—a lesson he learned long ago, and still takes to heart: “My grandfather taught me a long time ago that the three most essential phrases in business are I don’t know, I’ll find out, and I’ll get back to you.”
