This is an interesting concept, but I don’t know if hospitals (customers) will want IT companies to reach out directly to their customers (patients). For instance, what would the hospital do if the vendor informed the patient of the multiple alarms that were ignored by physicians and nurses due to mild drug — drug interactions. It does seem that vendors should have direct patient input for patient facing applications such as patient portals. Vendors already pay their demo client expenses to “engage” at HIMSS. No need to have “paid” patient promoters. HIMSS could support patient perspectives by identifying vendors that can provide entire patient records to patients with a single click. Vendors could also highlight the number of patients that use this patient facing feature sorted by hospital on a monthly basis.