HAT 2013 - Diabeter

Diabeter has developed seperate institutions for diabetes type 1 patients. One of the main reasons for developing these new institutions was the rigidness of hospitals when implementing dedicated IT systems to treat disease oriented populations not targeted at the local region of the hospital.

In the diabeter centers everything is centralized around technology IT with a high level of medical specialization. Because the patients are not close to the hospital, IT infrastructure is also very important for distance communication with the patient (tele-medicine).

Example innovation: 

Patients are provided with a USB enabled blood sugar measurement device which is coupled to the computer by the patient at home and the data is transferred to the hospital. Users of this USB device are more inclined to often upload their data and include questions about their data and thus are more engaged in their own clinical process.

They developed a very dedicated, specialized electronic patient record system in which analysis of collected patient data, feedback to the patient, etc is automated. 

SSL is used to safeguard the security of the communication as well as avoiding the sending of the identifying information of a patient.

Emerging mHealth: Paths for growth

PWC published a report entitled "Emerging mHealth: Pahts for growth" that shares the results of a global research study about the opportunities and challenges of mobile health from the perspective of patients, payers and providers. The pdf of the report can be found here. The presentation on the report can be found on slideshare here. 

Next-gen PACS according to Eliot Siegel

Look at this Diagnostic Imaging interview with Eliot Siegel recorded at SIIM with his vision of the next generation PACS with, what he calls, clinical analytics. http://bcove.me/nfo2uwot

DIY (Diagnose It Yourself) Medicine Begins With An Open Source Reinvention Of The Stethoscope

Check this great movie showing the capabilities of home operated devices. http://www.healthimaginghub.com/index.php?option=com_jomtube&view=video&id=547

KPMG Report on Global Lessons in E-Health Implementation

A report entitled "Accelerating Innovation: The Power of the Crowd" was recently published by KPMG.

In this report it is stated that eHealth requires a holistic and integrated approach. To achieve this they propose three basic concepts:

1. Crowd accelerated innovation
2. Collaborative alignment
3. Creative dislocation

By doing this they propose to use the crowd to develop sustainable e-health initiatives.

Download the full report here.

Social Media use in Healthcare

Use of social media by healthcare professionals is a matter of growing debate and concern. Discussions are on the way how healthcare professionals should behave themselves when using social media and several guidelines are proposed and published by different organisations in a variety of countries.

To provide insight in social media and what is involved, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have published a document called "The Health Communicator's Social Media Toolkit".
This toolkit describes different social media tools and provides information on how to use them properly in a healthcare environment.

The Future of Integrated Health Care 2015

Check out this interesting movie on youtube. Is this where we are going??

The Future of Health Care is a subject that has been under intense speculation and debate in recent times across different forums. Several interesting prototypes and scenarios have been made by professionals and designers to give the World a glimpse of a fuzzy future.

Ergonomidesign have made it possible to actually experience the future of Health Care. Following their launch at the Medica/ Compamed trade fair (in Düsseldorf, Germany, Nov. 17-19), Ergonomidesign will present and demonstrate a future life science application that brings together 40 years of design experience for Ergonomidesign in the Life Science industry. This video is one of 2, that give an overview of the entire concept.

Action Plan E-Health - results of public consultation published

A final report on the public consultation on the eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020 has been published. The four main objectives resulting from this consultation are:

1. Increase awareness of the benefits and opportunities of eHealth, and empower citizens, patients and healthcare professionals.
2. Address issues currently impeding eHealth interoperability
3. Improve legal certainty for eHealth
4. Support research and innovation in eHealth and development of a competitive European market

The consultation participants proposed that the European Commision should contribute to the plan by:

1. Supporting systematic evaluation of benefits, costs and usefulness of eHealth solutions
2. Providing guidance for achieving EU wide interoperability (e.g. the use of common standards, profiles, terminologies); and
3. Supporting deployment of eHealth services/solutions based on evidence facilitating cooperation between Member States and/or regions to address common challenges. 

The full report can be found here.

Health data protection standards developed by ISO

Hospital IT Europe featured an article on a new standard developed by ISO which focuses on health data protection.

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has published a new technical specification which will increase protection of personal health information processed, stored and transferred by computer systems for subsequent use by clinicians and others in healthcare organisations. 

ISO/TS 14265:2011, Health informatics - Classification of purposes for processing personal health information defines a set of high-level categories of purposes for which such personal health information can be processed.

The abstract from the ISO website describes the standard as:

ISO/TS 14265:2011 defines a set of high-level categories of purposes for which personal health information can be processed. This is in order to provide a framework for classifying the various specific purposes that can be defined and used by individual policy domains (e.g. healthcare organizations, regional health authorities, jurisdictions, countries) as an aid to the consistent management of information in the delivery of health care services and for the communication of electronic health records across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries.

The scope of application of ISO/TS 14265:2011 is limited to Personal Health Information as defined in ISO 27799, information about an identifiable person that relates to the physical or mental health of the individual, or to provision of health services to the individual.

Health IT coming of age

Mostashari shares visions of health IT's future

Farzad Mostashari, MD, National Coordinator for Health IT, clued the nation into five health IT trends expected to take off as healthcare reform progresses and predicted that 2012 is the year that health IT “truly comes of age.”

The Five trends Mostashari mentions in this article are:

1) Meaningful Use

2) Health Information Exchange (HIE)

3) Health IT and Payment Reform

4) e-Health

5) Innovation