2010 VMUG was a blast. As usual the booths were stocked with tchotchkes, the drinks were tasty, and the networking possibilities were great. Although I think we were all the little disappointed with the patriot loss, and the missed opportunity to get tackled by security guards when trying to sneak a peek at practice.

Registration numbers reached an all-time high with over 1,200 registrants. I heard sponsors were even turned down. Breakout sessions were held on the same side as the booths (yay for cutting down on those freezing walks) but lunch and keynotes were held on the other.

Unsurprisingly everyone seems to still be buzzing over cloud computing. I bumped shoulders with numerous people spending time and money on building their own clouds, and others begging for a better resource on what their peers are doing.

But my favorite tidbit was the provision in the government’s stimulus package – The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. If you haven’t already heard, the bill offers medical facilities as much at $64,000 per physician, and $10 million per hospital, if they make meaningful use of certified electronic health record systems in the next year and a half, and punishes them with cuts to their Medicare reimbursements if they do not do so by 2015. The purpose is to drive an overwhelming number of providers to invest in and implement healthcare IT solutions over the next several years.

Despite the concern over the deficit that it’s creating, it will be interesting to see whether the investments in IT will be effective in creating the desired ripple in growth for surrounding industries.

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