Editorial
My Fundamental Right to Cross-Border Healthcare
Dear Reader, Properly working cross-border healthcare is a fundamental right of every European citizen. This goes hand in hand with the free movement of persons. The European Union has its main focus on IT collaboration with the USA. But HITM feels that this is too narrow. Therefore we have taken the decision to closely collaborate with the Middle East, Africa and Asia. To administer this goal we had to...
HITM News
Spain
University of Granada researchers have developed a software tool that makes an accurate estimation of the risk that a person has to suffer a heart disease. In addition, this software tool allows the performance of massive risk estimations, i.e. it helps to estimate the risk that a specific population group has of suffering a heart condition. The researchers employed a sample including 3,000 patients...
Telecare in Andalusia
The University Hospital Virgen Macarena of Seville and the Superior Engineering School of Seville University are jointly carrying out a new research project for the implementation of a complete telecare system for kidney patients. “Modular customisable architecture for complete kidney patient telecare” will study the implementation of a telemedicine system for the monitoring of pre-dialysis pat...
UK
The UK government has announced £4 million of funding for businesses to develop cutting-edge ideas to address some of the biggest health problems of our time. The Department of Health has opened two new competitions with up to £2 million of funding each to develop technological and innovative solutions that can: Change people’s behaviour in order to reduce the impact of obesity and alcohol relat...
Poland
The Polish Ministry of Health has recently launched 'Dlapacjenta.mz.gov.pl', a portal providing practical information on the reimbursement of medicines. Designed as an easy-to-use and convenient information source on medicines reimbursed by the National Health fund, patients are the first target group. Through the new portal, patients have access to information on all procedures and conditions for...
Exhibitors @ RSNA 2010
Agfa
A new agreement with DataFirst will deliver automated migration services for cardiology, significantly increasing efficiency and quality of the migration process. The companies will provide data migration service capabilities and archival storage solutions, enabling healthcare facilities to benefit from a rapid data migration process from aged media and end of life archive devices. Cardiology da...
Carestream
One of the first medical imaging data archiving and sharing projects in France using CARESTREAM Vue Cloud PACS and Vue Cloud Archive is now operational. Data is hosted at the Roanne Numeri- Parc secure data centre (ISO27001 certified) in the Loire Region (south-east of France), and built around the Axione highspeed telecommunications network. The Saint Etienne University Hospital led the group c...
IBM
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and IBM have agreed to collaborate on the development of a powerful tool built upon IBM Watson in order to provide medical professionals with improved access to current and comprehensive cancer data and practices. The resulting decision support tool will help doctors everywhere create individualised cancer diagnostic and treatment recommendations for...
Sectra
The Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg has invested in the Sectra Visualisation Table. Gothenburg thus becomes the second Swedish University in a short period of time to reinforce its medical training by acquiring Sectra’s visualisation table. The visualisation table at the University of Gothenburg will be used by students in anatomy classes as a complement to dissection exer...
Aperio
Aperio, provider of digital pathology systems, announced a strategic collaboration with Dell to create the world's first scalable, secure medical cloud network for Pathology. Through its secure cloud-based Unified Clinical Archive solution, Dell manages nearly five billion medical images and studies for healthcare organisations. Now, Dell will host the existing suite of Aperio's solutions for di...
EU News
Integrated IT to Optimise Patient Care
In March of this year COCIR - the European trade association for the medical technology industry hosted a meeting with the European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy, John Dalli and senior representatives from hospital and healthcare providers. The meeting in Paris showcased how integrated IT and innovative financial partnerships are optimising patient care. Commissioner Dalli is supporti...
Kpmg Report: Tech-Savvy Baby Boomers to Drive Demand for E-Health
The report from KPMG together with the Manchester Business School, Accelerating Innovation: The power of the crowd, is based on in-depth interviews with ehealth executives representing 15 countries, as well as insights from KPMG's global healthcare partners. Due to changing demographics, the need to reduce costs and to increase the quality of care, e-health is seen as a crucial approach to address t...
Call for Papers
Researchers are invited to submit research articles addressing the new research and development of wearable devices, which can be used for the monitoring and treatment of patients suffering from chronic diseases. Of particular interest are papers which consider a set of sensors, algorithms for physiological signal processing, collection of environmental data, data fusion, detection and quantification...
European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing
A new website, the "Marketplace for Innovative ideas" was recently launched as part of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA). The Marketplace is an interactive website designed to help those that are interested and involved in the Partnership to work together and develop their innovative ideas. It is a platform where stakeholders can: Find partners to collab...
Cover Story
Data Privacy in a Wider Perspective of Risk Management
Data privacy should be seen in a wider perspective of risk management and governance. Due to recent events (e.g. the financial crisis), governance and risk management are hot topics for media coverage, especially within the financial sector. However, these topics are also high on the agenda in the boardrooms of private companies in the corporate world, due to earlier scandals like Enron and Worldcom....
Data Ownership & Protection Issues
Technological advances have created great opportunities for society to develop new products and services, and to communicate and share data. A tremendous amount of ubiquitous computational power and online services are used every day as a normal commodity. These new facilities allow data storage and exchange of information anytime and anywhere, at high speed. In recent years, cloud computing is the new...
Features
Are You Optimising... Your Capital Equipment Investment?
Hospitals can no longer afford to let the “squeaky wheel” or departmental politics drive capital equipment decisions. Rather, with CESP, the perils of opinionbased investments are replaced with qualitative and comprehensive analyses. Hospital executives can now make better-informed decisions because the provided data was validated and weighted, most often by an unbiased third party consultant. C...
Is a Zero Capital Eexpenditure, Managed Service Model the Way Forward?
With decreasing healthcare reimbursement and increasing economic uncertainty, there is a growing trend for hospitals to opt for a zero capital expenditure, managed service model with the purchase of IT systems in healthcare. As the application of managed service models emerges in the PACS market, it pav...
“Linking people, potential and progress”
The main objective of HIMSS 2012 was helping healthcare IT professionals to achieve new goals while maintaining their organisation’s commitment to unsurpassed quality of care. It was about bridging the gap between meeting requirements and implementing processes. Hot topics at this year’s conference included:Clinical and business intelligence;Mobile technology;ICD-10;Meaningful use; andPrivacy, security...
HIT Leadership at the Speed of Change
One of the key highlights from HIMSS 2012 was the CHIME CIO Forum. The topic of this year’s forum was Healthcare IT Leadership at the Speed of Change. The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organisation dedicated to serving chief information officers and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With more than 1,400 CIO members and 86 healthcare IT vendors and profe...
Uncluttered Management Thinking
Imagine an operating room with surgeons and scrub nurses operating on a patient. Imagine they all had a different understanding of the word ‘surgery’. Imagine they were unsure about their tasks, competencies, and responsibilities. Imagine they would evaluate their performance by the duration of the operation rather than by the outcome. Imagine they would handle the medical instruments by instinct rathe...
How to Conduct Staff Appraisals
A staff appraisal is a periodical advisory and support discussion between staff members and management that fosters agreements about objectives and the achievement of targets, that can be incorporated into target agreements. This process provides the opportunity, in a systematic and structured way that is outside of every-day working routine, to discuss matters that support and advance target-oriented coop...
Technology horizons: Digital radiography
The emergence of digital radiography has altered the face of radiography in the recent past. It has offered a new standard for digital x-ray image capture. DR technology has brought about a transition from film-based image capture to direct digital image capture that can be previewed immediately after exposure. This optimised workflow provided by DR is highly beneficial for end users, particularly those wi...
Implementing Lossy Compression
Canada is implementing a network of large data repositories designed to store all diagnostic imaging studies generated in hospitals and clinics across the country. There will be 18 such storage units covering all provinces, called DI-r (Digital Images Repositories). The goal of this project is to make all imaging studies available to healthcare professionals, wherever they are, increase efficiency and decr...
Management
Josep Manel Picas President, HITM
Q: National Healthcare and Indeed Healthcare IT Systems Often Suffer from Fragmentation. Is this a Problem in Spain? A: There is no national IT healthcare programme in Spain. Spain is a highly decentralised country with regards to the organisation and provision of healthcare services, which means that the regions have the responsibility of the management of these services depending on their own budgets. The...
Interview
The Spanish Healthcare System
In 1998 the Sistema Sanitario Público (public health service) brought in an official mandate for both doctors and patients outlining the service to which they are entitled, explained in the Carta de Derechos y Deberes (Charter of Rights and Obligations).Management The national system has been decentralised since 2002, which has given the regional healthcare authorities the autonomy to plan, change and upg...
The State of Health IT in Iberia
In years past, much of the focus on European markets concentrated on the arger economies of Germany, the UK, France, and Italy. There is relatively little knowledge of the healthcare IT markets in other Eurozone countries, particularly among US vendors looking to expand into continental Europe. This executive brief will focus on the countries of Spain and Portugal. Unlike Germany and the Netherlan...