February 17, 2022

AFC Industries PA at HIMSS 2022

AFC Industries PA at HIMSS 2022: Medical Carts, Mobile Workstations, and a Telehealth Cart at the Orange County Convention Center, Orlando

 

Table of Contents

  1. What Was HIMSS 2022 and How Did It Differ from HIMSS 2021?
  2. What AFC Industries PA Exhibited at HIMSS 2022
  3. Why the Telehealth Cart Was the Right Product for HIMSS 2022
  4. What Does a Clinical Telehealth Remote Cart Need to Do?
  5. AFC Industries PA’s Three-Year HIMSS Presence: 2021, 2022, 2023

 

QUICK ANSWER — AFC Industries PA, a Pennsylvania-based manufacturer of medical carts and healthcare workstation solutions, exhibited at HIMSS 2022 — the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Annual Conference and Exhibition — held March 14–18, 2022 at the Orange County Convention Center, Orlando, Florida. The exhibit featured AFC Industries PA’s range of medical carts, mobile workstations, and specifically a telehealth remote communications cart — reflecting HIMSS 2022’s dominant agenda themes of telehealth permanence, hybrid care infrastructure, and EHR workflow mobility at the point of care.

 

HIMSS 2022 felt different from HIMSS 2021 in the way that year two of anything feels different from year one. The 2021 show in Las Vegas was a statement: we’re back, the industry is intact, and in-person healthcare IT is happening again. HIMSS 2022 in Orlando was the show where the statement became a conversation — about what telehealth looked like when it wasn’t being deployed under emergency conditions, about how EHR workflows should be redesigned for hybrid care permanently, about which digital health investments made during the pandemic were worth sustaining and which were workarounds that could finally be replaced properly.

For AFC Industries PA, those conversations are where our products sit most naturally. Medical carts and mobile workstations are the physical infrastructure that digital health workflows depend on at the point of care. The telehealth remote communications cart we brought to HIMSS 2022 was a direct response to what two years of pandemic-era telehealth deployment had taught the industry: that a telehealth system without a correctly specified mobile platform is a software investment that underdelivers its clinical promise. We were at the Orange County Convention Center in March 2022 because that’s where the people building the next generation of healthcare digital infrastructure were gathered.

 

What Was HIMSS 2022 and How Did It Differ from HIMSS 2021?

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s Annual Conference and Exhibition returned to Orlando in 2022 for the first time since HIMSS19. HIMSS 2022 ran March 14–18, 2022 at the Orange County Convention Center — one of the largest convention facilities in the United States, with the floor space and technical infrastructure that the scale of HIMSS requires. Attendance was substantial, with the health information technology sector returning to Orlando in force after the Las Vegas iteration in 2021.

The themes at HIMSS 2022 reflected a healthcare IT sector that had spent two years adapting under pressure and was now beginning to assess what those adaptations meant for long-term strategy. Telehealth was no longer an emergency response — it was a permanent care delivery channel that needed sustainable infrastructure, quality standards, and workflow integration. EHR interoperability and the 21st Century Cures Act’s information blocking provisions were moving from regulatory theory to operational implementation. Health equity and digital access were prominent agenda items, reflecting the pandemic’s documented impact on health disparities.

For exhibitors whose products sit at the physical infrastructure layer — carts, workstations, mobile platforms — HIMSS 2022 was the year when the audience had moved from “we need something quickly” to “we need something correctly.” The emergency telehealth carts deployed in 2020 and 2021 were being evaluated against long-term clinical performance, and the gaps in their specification — battery life, stability, cleaning protocol compatibility, height adjustment for clinical teams — were visible after two years of use.

For context on AFC Industries PA’s exhibit at HIMSS 2021 in Las Vegas, see our HIMSS 2021 recap. For information on HIMSS and the healthcare IT landscape, visit himss.org.

 

What AFC Industries PA Exhibited at HIMSS 2022

AFC Industries PA’s HIMSS 2022 exhibit centred on the physical infrastructure that healthcare IT systems need to function correctly at the point of care. Three product categories anchored the exhibit, directly reflecting the HIMSS 2022 agenda themes:

 

AFC INDUSTRIES PA AT HIMSS 2022: PRODUCTS ON DISPLAY

Medical carts. Medical carts and point-of-care platforms for bedside EHR documentation, medication administration verification, and clinical data access. As HIMSS 2022 discussions moved from emergency EHR deployment to sustainable workflow integration, bedside cart infrastructure was a central procurement conversation for hospital IT teams evaluating their long-term point-of-care setup.

Mobile workstations and solutions. Computer carts and mobile workstations for clinical documentation mobility, nurse station flexibility, and patient-facing digital interactions. Mobile clinical workstations underpin the EHR workflow redesigns that HIMSS 2022’s interoperability agenda required — staff need to access and update records wherever care is delivered, not only at fixed central stations.

Telehealth remote communications cart. Telehealth and remote communications carts — the featured product at AFC Industries PA’s HIMSS 2022 booth and the product most directly responsive to the conference’s dominant agenda. The telehealth cart provides a mobile, stable, clinically configured platform for video consultation, remote patient monitoring, and specialist access that performs correctly in clinical environments rather than in controlled pilots.

 

Why the Telehealth Cart Was the Right Product for HIMSS 2022

Telehealth adoption increased 38-fold during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to McKinsey. By HIMSS 2022, the urgent question was not whether telehealth worked — the sector had demonstrated that it could be deployed rapidly under emergency conditions — but whether the physical infrastructure supporting it was adequate for the sustained, long-term clinical use that permanent telehealth programmes required.

The answer, in many cases, was no. Telehealth pilots deployed on consumer tablets propped against desk organisers, or on hastily assembled carts not designed for clinical environments, had accumulated a visible set of infrastructure problems: batteries that didn’t last a full clinic session, platforms that were unstable enough to affect video quality, surfaces that couldn’t survive clinical cleaning protocols, and cart heights wrong for the clinical team using them. These were not software problems. They were physical infrastructure problems with specific, addressable solutions.

AFC Industries PA’s telehealth remote communications cart addressed these specific failure points. A correctly specified telehealth cart for clinical use is not a converted office cart with a webcam. It is a mobile platform designed from the ground up for the clinical environment: stable camera platform, battery sized to a clinic session rather than a single call, surface materials compatible with hospital disinfection protocols, height adjustment for the clinical team’s working range, and cable management that keeps the consultation environment looking professional from the patient’s perspective on the other side of the call.

The HIMSS 2022 audience understood this problem precisely because they had been living with the consequences of underspecified emergency telehealth infrastructure for two years. That context made the product conversation at our booth substantively different from a pre-pandemic trade show conversation — attendees were evaluating against real deployment experience, not hypothetical requirements.

For the full technical case for telehealth cart specification, see the AFC Industries PA medical cart range and the product configurator for telehealth and clinical cart configurations.

 

What Does a Clinical Telehealth Remote Communications Cart Need to Do?

Based on the deployment experience that HIMSS 2022 attendees brought to the floor, a correctly specified clinical telehealth cart needs to address six specific requirements:

  • Stable camera platform. Camera stability at the correct eye-level height for the clinician in both seated and standing positions. An unstable platform produces video quality that undermines patient confidence in the consultation regardless of connection speed.
  • Session-length battery. Battery capacity sized to the actual session duration — not a single call but a clinic’s worth of consecutive calls. An emergency telehealth deployment that ran out of battery mid-session twice a week loses clinical adoption faster than any software problem.
  • Height adjustment for the clinical team. The cart must be usable by every clinician who uses it, not configured for an average height that fits no one precisely. Memory presets make reconfiguration between clinicians practical rather than theoretical.
  • Surface compatibility with disinfection protocols. Clinical telehealth carts are used in patient environments and must survive the cleaning protocols those environments require. Surface material incompatibility with hospital-grade disinfectants was a common failure mode in emergency-period telehealth cart deployments.
  • Clean background for patient-facing video. Cable management and surface organisation that ensures the camera view presents a professional clinical environment to the patient. A cluttered cart cable visible on screen communicates disorganisation in a professional context where patient confidence matters.
  • EHR integration support. A cart platform that supports the EHR terminal or tablet integration that allows documentation during or immediately after the telehealth consultation, not in a separate workflow step that reintroduces the documentation gap the cart was meant to close.

 

AFC Industries PA’s Three-Year HIMSS Presence: 2021, 2022, and Beyond

HIMSS 2022 was the second of three consecutive HIMSS conferences at which AFC Industries PA exhibited. We attended HIMSS 2021 in Las Vegas as part of the sector’s return to in-person healthcare IT, and went on to exhibit at HIMSS 2023 at McCormick Place in Chicago. Three years of HIMSS attendance reflects a deliberate choice: the HIMSS audience — hospital CIOs, clinical informatics directors, nursing technology leads, biomedical engineers, healthcare procurement teams — is the most directly relevant professional community for the products we build.

Each HIMSS event has produced a different conversation, shaped by where the healthcare IT sector was in its development cycle. HIMSS 2021 was the return. HIMSS 2022 was the reckoning with what had been deployed under pressure and what needed to be done properly. HIMSS 2023 brought new themes in AI-assisted clinical decision support and advanced interoperability that created new requirements for the physical infrastructure that carries those systems. AFC Industries PA has shown up to all three because the conversation about clinical digital infrastructure is ongoing, not settled.

Contact the AFC Industries PA team to discuss telehealth cart specifications or clinical workstation requirements for your facility. Browse the full medical cart and mobile workstation range, explore custom and OEM configurations, or use the product configurator to build a specification from your department’s workflow requirements. AFC Industries PA is based at 230 S Poplar St, Berwick, PA 18603.