Editorial

Dear Reader, This years' HIMSS 2012 Las Vegas conference has once again highlighted the key importance of IT in successful healthcare deployment. Despite the fact that European IT solutions level up and even out-perform American counterparts, the US seems miles ahead in terms of information exchange amongst IT professionals and openness towards innovation. Therefore it is more than ever one of the key re...

Association News

The European Association of Healthcare IT Managers The European Association of Healthcare IT Managers (HITM) is a non-profit pan-European umbrella association of all relevant national healthcare IT associations in Europe. Believing in the fundamental importance of unifying healthcare IT professionals at European and global levels, HITM is committed to increasing the professional authority and responsibili...

National snomed ct terminology management centre established The new National SNOMED CT Terminology Management Centre at the Lithuanian Medical Library officially commenced activities in early January. The introduction of standardised clinical languages for medical information systems is a step forward in improving healthcare quality and safety. More and more countries are giving priority to implementing S...

Patient group declare support for summary care record A year on from a Ministerial review that confirmed the importance of Summary Care Records in supporting urgent and emergency care, patient groups are advocating its use to improve care for the millions of people with long term conditions they represent. The Muscular Dystrophy Campaign recently recommended that their patients consider adding important...

Medical Informatics Community Contributes to Fostering Health Information Systems Introperability After an agreement between the government Agency for Shared Health Information Systems (ASIP Santé) and the French Association for the Applications of Medical Informatics (AIM), the latter is working to develop technical and semantic interoperability between health information systems (HIS). Such interoperabi...

Minister Lacunches First National Electronic GP Referral System The Minister for Health, Dr James Reilly TD launched Ireland’s first national electronic GP referral system on Friday 27 January. A joint collaboration between the National Cancer Control Programme and the Irish College of General Practitioners, the new system is already in use with over 4, 000 patients referred into breast, prostate and lu...

Exhibitors @ RSNA 2010

Advanced Computer Software Group, a leading provider of software and IT services to the UK health, care and business sectors has announced that it now supplies mobile devices inclusive of airtime as part of its iConnect and iNurse mobile working solutions - providing a complete “one stop shop” for mobile working in the community care sector. Advanced’s iConnect and iNurse are mobile solutions for hea...

First Databank (FDB), provider of drug knowledge bases and clinical decision support, has announced the continuation of the successful partnership with Helix Health. The contract provides Helix Health with FDB’s clinical databases for the next three years. Helix Health is continuing to use FDB’s information within their product suite in the Republic of Ireland and UK, targeted towards hospital pharmaci...

‘3millionlives' will enable more people with long-term conditions and social care needs to be supported by tel ecare and telehealth. Tunstall Health care is supporting a new approach that aims to transform the lives of three million people with long-term conditions or social care needs, uti lising telehealth and telecare within health and social care services. Launched by the Minister of State for Care S...

EU News

The programme for the Danish presidency was officially presented on the 6th of January at a press conference in Copenhagen. The four fundamental priorities for the Danish Presidency are: A responsible Europe; A dynamic Europe;, A green Europe; and A safe Europe. By working for a responsible, dynamic, green and safer Europe, the Presidency will prepare Europe for the future economically, socially and envir...

The first European Robotics Week was held from November 28 to December 4, 2011. More than 130 organisations and institutes in 19 European countries organised over 360 robotics related activities. Based on initial estimates about 80,000 people have been reached across Europe. In the near future robots and devices with robotic functions will be used almost everywhere. Creating an energy and resource-efficien...

A final report on the public consultation on the eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020 has been published. The consultation, which involved a range of stakeholders including NGOs, academic institutions, enterprises, health and social care providers and public authorities from many Member States, aimed to validate four proposed objectives and to explore possible actions to be undertaken in the coming years. More th...

Cover Story

The European Association of Healthcare IT Managers and the European Association of Hospital Managers is proud to present the Winners, finalists and nominees for the IT@networking Awards 2012 (IT@2012). These fifteen medical technology and healthcare IT projects came to brussels on the 18-19 January to battle it out to win the coveted IT@2012 trophy and prize money. Yet again the sheer number and quality of...

The very first IT @ Networking Awards took place in 2009 and was won by Dr. Pierre Biron and his team for The Health Information System of the Rhône- Alpes region (SISRA) and the Shared and Distributed Patient Record (DPPR). Rhône-Alpes is a French region with 6 millions inhab- itants. SISRA connects 55 hospitals (33%), and 66 % of its hospital beds. Founding partners are the three University hospitals o...

In 2011 the IT@Networking Awards expanded its remit to include healthcare IT and medical technology products from across the globe and Prachi Shukla took first prize with her inspiring healthcare for the rural poor project in India. The project combines technology with village entrepreneurs acting as facilitators to connect rural communities with formally qualified urban doctors, enabling them to access ti...

As the cost of sequencing the human genome falls, medical use of whole-genome sequencing in the clinic is rapidly approaching academic medical centres. In order to support the foreseeable flood of genomic information in the clinic an Oracle based database and business intelligence solution to detect genomic variants has been built at Erasmus university Medical Center (ErasmusMC), rotterdam, the Netherlands...

The lV Prasad Eye Institute (lVPEI) was established in 1986-87 at Hyderabad as a not-for-profit, non-government, public-spirited, comprehensive eye care institution. from its very beginning, it set forth as its core values the “Three E’s”: Equity, Efficiency and Excellence. Equity translates as treating all patients (paying for services or not, rich or poor) with the same high-quality, no-compromise...

Detecting signs of awareness in patients recovering from coma is still a huge challenge for clinicians. Indeed, a high rate of misdiagnosis was highlighted in this population showing that up to 40 percent of vegetative patients are in fact conscious (i.e. minimally conscious state). Clinically, the assessment of consciousness is based on behavioural responses. However, motor and verbal functions can be imp...

A special system is projected to perform PACS software (Sisopacs CE Certified, IHE Compliant) with the contribution of academicians, radiologists, physicians and R&D software and hardware specialists, in a 3D environment via 3D glasses and mechanical gloves that are being uniquely designed by Sisoft's R&D team for pre-surgical operations in order to examine and analyse medical data and images throu...

"La Fe" in Valencia, Spain-Mobility System to Guarantee Clinical Safety and Optimise Beside Processes,Saving Cost. This specialty care centre is part of the Spanish public hospital network, with 1,300 beds, 39 operating rooms and more than 4,000 patients/day. Taking advantage of relocating to a new hospital, an innovative RFID and Wi-Fi system has been implemented to guarantee clinical safety and provide id...

Hospices Civils de Lyon (HCL) is made up of 14 public hospitals, 123 surgical units and handles 900,000 medical appointments every year. The MyHCL project aims to facilitate the lives of our patients and increase their loyalty by offering online services like appointment requests, admissions, meetings or follow-up. MyHCL is a web application with a rich user interface created with the Microsoft .NET Framew...

Savings Lives and Reducing Costs by Extending Best-Practices in Surgery and Critical Care Across the Enterprise The Prefense® project uses a miniaturised, ergonomic, body-mounted monitor that transmits real-time patient data to computerised records via an HL7 interface. A customised algorithm reduces false alarms and mobilises life-saving care teams when changes in vital signs indicate a medical crisis. It...

IT @ Networking Awards 2012

Ágora - Lightweight EHR Viewer The EHR viewer (Ágora) in the Murcia Health Service displays real-time patient clinical information that is distributed across diverse and heterogeneous data sources in less than three seconds. Acting as mediator between its various information systems, Ágora simulates data centralisation without large-scale data storage. Ágora is the first project that does not attempt m...

Features

Following my article written last year about the conception system, classification and situation of e-Health in Hungary I received numerous opinions, remarks, questions and ideas. It was interesting for me that health experts and informatics professionals working in other sectors see the problems and the possibilities from quite different perspectives. After this feedback I decided to review and extend my...

Its reliance on biomarker evaluation for diagnosis and treatment decisions makes breast cancer care a good example of personalised medicine. In addition to breast cancer biomarkers such as the oestrogen/progesterone receptor and the Ki-67 proliferation marker, HER2 (Human Epidermal growth factor Receptor 2) has received particular attention in the recent years. 20 - 30 percent of women with breast cancer t...

The healthcare sector is subject to great technological change in an effort to improve current practice and patient safety. While the use of information technology has been encouraged as a solution to improve patient safety and reduce medication errors, appropriate methods must be applied to the design and development of such systems to ensure they are usable. An interdisciplinary team, comprising experts...

Using High Intensity Narrow-Spectrum Light(HINS-Light) Increased awareness of the importance of the hospital environment as a potential source of nosocomial pathogens has led to an upsurge of interest in hospital cleaning and decontamination procedures and technologies. It is now known that certain pathogens, such as MRSA and Acinetobacter can survive for many months on environmental surfaces within the hos...

Interview

The Greek healthcare system is characterised by the coexistence of a National Health System (NHS), compulsory social insurance and a strong voluntary private healthcare system. The NHS provides universal coverage to the population and in addition, the entire population is covered by social insurance funds and 15 percent of the population maintains complementary voluntary health insurance coverage, which, t...

The current trend in innovative healthcare provision is the use of information and communication technology (ICT). ICT is totally affiliated with the development of added value. The implementation of informatics for the production and diffusion of intra-hospital medical information, where the collision between technology’s rationalism and bureaucracy is usually met, is focusing on modernisation and impro...


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