When IBM CEO Ginni Rometty delivered the opening keynote at HIMSS17 sheeffectively set the stagefor artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and machine learning to be prevalent themes throughout the rest of the conference.

Other top trends buzzed about in Orlando: cloud computing and population health.

Healthcare IT News asked our readers where they stand in terms of these initiatives. And we threw in a bonus question to figure out what their favorite part of HIMSS17 was.

Some 70 percent of respondents are either actively planning or researching artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and machine learning technologies while 7 percent are rolling them out and 1 percent have already completed an implementation.

A Sunday afternoon session featuring AI startups demonstrated the big promise of such tools as well as the persistent questions, skepticism and even fearwhen it comes to these emerging technologies.

Whereas AI was considerably more prominent in the HIMSS17 discourse than in years past, population health management has been among the top trends for the last couple conferences.

Its not entirely surprising that more respondents, 30 percent,are either rolling out or have completed a rollout of population health technologies, while 50 percent are either researching actively planning to do so.

One striking similarity between AI and population health is the 20 percent of participants responding that they have no interest in either. For cloud computing, meanwhile, only 7 percent indicated they are not interested.

Though cloud computing is not a new concept, it is widely seen as such in the HIPAA-sensitive world of personally-identifiable and protected health information. The overarching themes at the pre-conference HIMSS and Healthcare IT News Cloud Computing Forum on Sunday were that security is not a core competency of hospital and health systems, thus many cloud providers can better protect health data and the ability to spin up server, storage and compute resources on Amazon, Google or Microsoft is enabling a whole new era of innovation that simply is not possible when hospitals have to invest in their own infrastructure to run proofs-of-concept and pilot programs. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for instance,cut $5 million from its annual infrastructure budgetby opting for infrastructure-as-a-service.

Here comes the bonus question: What was your favorite part of HIMSS17?

The show floor won hands-down, followed by education sessions, then networking events and, in a neck-and-neck tie are keynotes and parties/nightlife.

This article is part of our ongoing coverage of HIMSS17. VisitDestination HIMSS17for previews, reporting live from the show floor and after the conference.

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Poll: Where readers stand on artificial intelligence, cloud computing and population health - Healthcare IT News