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Med-e-Tel 2009: the times they are exciting!
This newsletter is your source for Med-e-Tel updates, news from the Med-e-Tel partners, sponsors, exhibitors and speakers, as well as other telemedicine and ehealth news from around the world.
Things have come a long way since the initial steps of Med-e-Tel, some 9-10 years ago. eHealth and telemedicine applications have become more widely known, accepted and used. And new devices, systems and technologies have seen the light of day.
So the times they are a-changing! One might even say: the times they are exciting! Despite the gloom of the financial and economic crisis, healthcare IT is poised for growth. In the United States, the new administration has pledged support for healthcare IT in its multi billion dollar economic stimulus package. The European Commission at the end of last year communicated its goals and plans for a more widespread use and adoption of telemedicine technologies. And other initiatives around the world have emerged, on local, regional, national and international scale.
Also healthcare professionals, healthcare organizations, and health insurers, are increasingly looking for new ways of providing and delivering care, using the ICT tools that now exist.
But we are not there yet, and there is work to be done to increase acceptance, to change care processes, and to build sustainable care models.
Med-e-Tel continues to contribute to this challenge by bringing together stakeholders from around the world to exchange experiences and best practices.
In this issue of the Med-e-Tel newsletter you will find a preview of just some of the topics that will be presented in the Med-e-Tel 2009 conference program. Full program details will be made available soon on the Med-e-Tel website .
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Featured Partner
The International Society for Telemedicine & eHealth (ISfTeH) exists to facilitate the international dissemination of knowledge and experience in telemedicine and ehealth and to provide access to recognized experts in the field worldwide.
Currently, national and institutional organizations from over 45 countries are already involved in the ISfTeH.
The ISfTeH will host several conference sessions at Med-e-Tel 2009, including a session on Telenursing, coordinated by the ISfTeH Telenursing Working Group, and a session providing an overview of national programs and initiatives presented by some of the ISfTeH national member associations.
ISfTeH will also present some of its members in the Med-e-Tel expo area. And there will be the traditional Member Breakfast Meeting, as well as a meeting of the ISfTeH Board of Directors.
That's plenty of opportunity to meet and network at Med-e-Tel with people who are at the forefront of telemedicine and ehealth development in their country.
Join the ISfTeH at Med-e-Tel and learn more about how you can become part of our growing international telemedicine and ehealth network and how the ISfTeH can help you to develop your business, promote your research, enhance your healthcare services, or broaden your educational programs.
Med-e-Tel works together with a distinguished academy of organizations, associations and institutions who are active in the fields of ehealth, telemedicine, and health ICT.
Click here for a full list of supporting organizations and partners. |
Featured Media Partners
E-HEALTH-COM is an independent magazine for health telematics and telemedicine. It features current developments in the eHealth sector as well as technical specifications. E-HEALTH-COM keeps you up-to-date, covers important issues of the future, and offers an essential communications platform for the eHealth community.
Hospital Information Technology Europe is a dedicated independent resource providing essential information and the latest news for hospital CIOs, network managers and strategic health authority IT heads across the EU.
Hospital Information Technology Europe delivers the latest news, technology reviews, updates on the latest developments and innovations, as well as comment on current policy and practice, both in print and online.
Hospital Post EMEA, in English, addresses 25,000 decision makers in hospitals throughout Europe and North Africa / Middle East. The bimonthly publication sports cutting-edge information on new technologies and approaches in diagnostics and therapy, in healthcare IT and facility management. Hospital Post is the one source of information decision makers located anywhere between Lisbon and Minsk, Oslo and Dubai require to keep up to date on innovations with a cross-departmental impact.
Infomedix International is a B2B magazine for the medical industry. Infomedix International is mailed to 15,000 medical manufacturers, dealers, distributors, importers, exporters, wholesalers and agents worldwide, and distributed at medical tradeshows around the world. Infomedix International is connecting medical businesses worldwide!
Telecare Aware has been providing a specialised, free news and information service since 2005 to people interested in telecare and telehealth. Its purpose is to help keep everyone up to date with what is happening around the world.
Telemedicine and e-Health covers all aspects of clinical telemedicine practice, technical advances, enabling technologies, education, health policy and regulation and biomedical and health services research dealing with clinical effectiveness, efficacy and safety of telemedicine and its effects on quality, cost and accessibility of care, medical records and transmission of same. In addition to high quality cutting-edge papers on telemedicine applications in medicine and public health, Telemedicine and e-Health publishes telemedicine news, provocative roundtable discussions, interviews with leaders in the field corporate profiles, telebusiness insights and analyses, new product information, and much more.
The Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare provides excellent coverage of developments in telemedicine and e-health and is now widely recognised as the leading journal in its field. Contributions from around the world provide a unique perspective on how different countries and health systems are using new technology in health care. Sections within the journal include technology updates, editorials, original articles, research tutorials, educational material, review articles and reports from various telemedicine organisations.
The Med-e-Tel media partnerships provide you with a look at a wide range of healthcare and medical journals, magazines and on-line news and information services that will help you to stay abreast of what is going on in the field of ehealth, telemedicine and healthcare IT and to make better informed decisions in your daily business or healthcare practice.
Pick up your personal copy of these publications in the Media Corner at Med-e-Tel 2009! |
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Med-e-Tel 2009 registration opens  Registration for Med-e-Tel 2009 is now open. Click here to access the online registration form and take two minutes to confirm your presence at The International eHealth, Telemedicine and Health ICT Forum. You can review the registration fees and conditions here.
Register now to benefit from the early bird fees which give you up to 25% discount on the regular registration fees. Registration will give you access to all conference sessions and workshops, expo area, receptions and unprecedented networking and learning opportunities.
ISfTeH, EHTEL, IACR and WABT members can benefit from an additional discount. Contact your association for more information.
According to the Luxembourg Convention Bureau who are the official hotel reservation agency for Med-e-Tel, hotels in Luxembourg are filling up fast for next April. They request that foreign participants who will stay overnight, would secure their hotel reservations as soon as possible. Consult the hotel information on the Med-e-Tel website and submit your reservation form now. |
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Med-e-Tel 2009 conference program taking shape The Med-e-Tel conference program will feature an exciting opening session with contributions from the International Society for Telemedicine & eHealth, European Health Telematics Association, Russian Telemedicine Association, European Commission, International Telecommunication Union and others who will provide insights into current initiatives and future directions in telemedicine and ehealth.
Furthermore, the three day program will include sessions and workshops on the topics of disease management, services for the ageing, teleconsultation, telenursing, nursing informatics, open source software, ehealth in developing countries, elearning, mobile solutions, ehealth in primary care, electronic health insurance cards, environmental conditions and telehealth, economic efficiency, national ehealth programs, determining health IT priorities and budgets, and more.
The Med-e-Tel expo will showcase innovations and services from companies, projects and organizations such as Aerotel Medical Systems, Aipermon, International Society for Telemedicine & eHealth (and several of its national, associate and institutional member organizations), NETCARDS, Vitalsys, and more names to come. It is the perfect place and opportunity to network - beyond the conference sessions - with technology providers, association executives and ehealth experts.
More updates and details will follow in upcoming newsletters and will be posted on the Med-e-Tel website shortly. The news articles below already provide a preview of some of the topics that will be presented within the frame of the Med-e-Tel conference program. |
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NETC@RDS announces Mid-Term workshop: "Deploying eEHIC services for borderless care in Europe"  The NETC@RDS for eEHIC ID, an EU co-funded project, aimed at achieving the initial deployment of an online service for the electronic European Health Insurance Card (eEHIC), has announced that its Mid-Term workshop will take place in Luxembourg on April 2nd, 2009 within the frame of Med-e-Tel, the International eHealth, Telemedicine and Health ICT Forum.
In awareness of Europe growing together, the NETC@RDS long term initiative is aiming to improve access to the healthcare systems in different regions within, currently, 16 European countries: Austria, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Liechtenstein, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia and Switzerland.
The existing service, already successfully tested during a market validation phase in 85 pilots across 10 EU Member States, has been progressively extended to enable easy access to healthcare for European citizens on temporary stays in any other EU country.
The project service sites are healthcare facilities (hospitals, ambulatory care and GPs offices) where the NETC@RDS services are being deployed and made operational, enabling "non-planned" healthcare for European citizens who provide evidence of entitlement.
The online service can be via an eye readable EHIC, or a national health insurance electronic card, or via certain national e-ID chip cards issued by the responsible government authorities of the participating partners. An online verification provides assurance to support acceptance procedures for both health insurances and healthcare providers. Using the NETC@RDS application and an optical card reader or a smart card reader, healthcare facility staff read administrative data from the EHIC or national health insurance card. Eligibility is then verified within a few seconds by checking the administrative data via two NETC@RDS portals against the database of the relevant health insurance authority. The electronic data set is processed and used as a proof of entitlement and guarantee of cross-border reimbursement.
The NETC@RDS workshop at Med-e-Tel will present how the project application matured, was validated and is now deployed through the service sites, opening a wide discussion on: policy and legal aspects, potential market dimension and commercial features of the services, and effectiveness of the proposed ICT solution in view of the interoperability of the eEHIC as forthcoming challenge for borderless care in Europe.
The workshop is aimed at government executives, policy decision makers, EU officials, representatives from healthcare organisations, healthcare professionals, industry and other healthcare stakeholders.
Workshop program will be made available soon on www.netcards.eu and www.medetel.eu.
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Priorities, benefits and budgets for health IT in the 21st century
The regional (BeLux) hospital administrator seminar that takes place every year within the frame of Med-e-Tel is also taking shape and will focus this year on "priorities, benefits and budgets for health IT in the 21st century."
The challenges for the 21st century are many and the stakes are high for all actors in the healthcare system: to guarantee a sustainable healthcare system, i.e. one that is capable of keeping costs under control while at the same time improving access to and quality of care.
Information technology offers real and workable solutions to face these challenges. Today, solutions already exist that can:- improve quality of care;
- reduce costs;
- improve prevention;
- share and exchange information with citizens/patients;
- target a specific pathology or group of diseases;
- favor a horizontally integrated approach of care.
These solutions are not yet widely used and implemented and it is difficult for hospital managers or department heads to justify the usefulness and pertinence of such investments. It often also proves difficult for them to make an adequate choice between various alternatives and to determine proper budgets.
The aims of the hospital administrator seminar at Med-e-Tel, organized in close cooperation with the Luxembourg CRP-Santé (Public Research Centre for Health), and endorsed by the Luxembourg Ministry of Health, are twofold:
- to reflect upon the short and medium term priorities and on making optimal choices for each individual hospital, each department and the healthcare system as a whole;
- share some of the most interesting experiences in the region and beyond, and show the benefits, as well as the conditions for success and the difficulties and resistance that can be met during implementation.
Details of the seminar will be made available in upcoming newsletters and on www.medetel.eu.
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eHealth: environmentalHealth! A rapid degradation of the natural environment with recent evidence of climate change has brought new interest in monitoring interactions between humans and the environment.
Typical applications are:
- Individual monitoring of physiological and environmental parameters, e.g., members of Antarctic expeditions, commercial divers, test pilots, fire-fighters. This is used mainly in occupational or sports medicine. The emphasis is on low weight, miniaturisation, simplicity and low bandwidth transmissions.
- Emergency and disaster relief monitoring of populations or groups in specific environments, e.g., earthquakes, floods, search and rescue operations, armed conflicts. The emphasis is on the integration of logistic, GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and health-related information. Space-borne technologies are frequently used for data acquisition and transmission. Data accessibility and reliability are important, and different systems' components typically operate in the low to high bandwidth range.
- Long-term monitoring of trends in large population groups, based on epidemiological data and on the observation of changes and trends in the natural environment, e.g., land, oceans, atmosphere, space weather, using both space- and ground-based observation networks.
The importance of these types of monitoring, and the role of space technologies in ehealth in general, is expected to increase significantly in the next few years.
The Med-e-Tel 2009 conference program will feature, in cooperation with the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, a session on "extreme environmental conditions and telehealth", providing a brief overview of relevant existing methods and of new trends in earth observation, in tracking and location, in communication, and in search and rescue. Interaction between human health and space weather will also be discussed.
More details will be made available on www.medetel.eu soon. |
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Building networks for eHealth research: generating the evidence base  In response to lack of demonstrated evidence of beneficial outcomes of eHealth, some key research institutions in Asia, such as Aga Khan University (AKU) Pakistan, Molave Development Foundation Philippines, Primary Care Doctors Association Malaysia, and Angeles University Philippines with the support of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and University of Calgary, Canada, set up a network of institutions, researchers, and experts in the developing countries of Asia with the goal of generating evidence in the field of eHealth. The initiative was named PAN Asian Collaboration for Evidence-based e-Health Adoption and Application (PANACeA).
Key benefits sought from the network approach are to (1) broaden the sharing of knowledge, (2) increase the scope for research activities, (3) greater capacity building, and (4) administrative resilience.
PANACeA aims to find answers to the following four core research questions:
- Which eHealth applications and practices have had the most beneficial outcomes on the health of individuals, communities and the improvement of health systems?
- What are the best ways for ensuring that beneficial outcomes can reach the segment of the population that still doesn't have adequate access to health services?
- What is the potential of using new pervasive technologies such as mobile phones/PDAs as tools to make the delivery of health services or information more effective?
- What types of technologies/applications are best suited to help prepare for, or mitigate the effects of disasters, pandemics and emerging and re-emerging diseases?
PANACeA offers a unique way of developing evidence in a local context, yet involving a large number of countries and developing new partnerships that may last beyond the duration of this project and would generate communities of practice within Asia.
The knowledge generated from these projects and PCTAs will also be disseminated widely so that it benefits healthcare providers, managers of healthcare institutions, researchers and policy-makers in advancement of eHealth.
The above are excerpts from an original article by Dr. Shariq Khoja and Dr. Hammad Durrani published in eHealth (Vol. 4, Issue 1, January 2009), a Med-e-Tel media partner. Click here for full article.
More on PANACeA and related activities will be presented at Med-e-Tel 2009. |
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eHealthServer.com: a project for and by the eHealth community
 The eHealthNews.eu Portal, a leading eHealth news, web based platform with core competence and innovative strength in advancing the European eHealth industry and research domains, has launched a new project addressed to the International eHealth Community, called "eHealthServer.com". According to Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for the Information Society, the global market for eHealth is estimated to have a potential value of €60 billion, of which Europe represents one third, i.e. €20 billion. eHealth can be considered the third largest European health industry, after pharmaceuticals valued at €205 billion (based on retail prices) and medical devices for which annual sales are estimated to be €64 billion. The goals of the eHealthServer.com project are the dissemination, awareness creation and advanced promotion activities addressed to the international eHealth industry and research domains. "By being enrolled for several years in the eHealth domain, I am continuously receiving many requests and suggestions to reflect the international eHealth achievements of European projects," says Ruslan David, eHealthNews.EU Portal administrator. "As a result, I am proud to announce eHealthServer.com. I am confident that in the near future it will have a recognizable voice in the international eHealth domain." Currently, eHealthServer.com presents the latest eHealth news articles comprising 'research & development', 'industry', 'products', and 'conferences & events' categories. Readers can subscribe (free of charge) by e-mail to the news alert service or by RSS feed reader to the published RSS news channel. "I would appreciate any feedback or comment regarding the current eHealthServer.com web appearance. Our core mission is to design a project not only 'for', but especially a project 'by' the international eHealth community," added Ruslan David. More information is available at www.ehealthserver.com. |
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Fifthplay acquires a majority stake in Vitalsys  Fifthplay, the Belgian high-tech company and developer of a service platform providing Internet access for 'smart' homes to applications and services supplied by partners in the care sector, comfort and energy sectors, has acquired a majority stake in Vitalsys, the Belgian market leader in telemedicine.
Vitalsys specialises in the integration of telemedical solutions for various medical applications, including telemonitoring. These applications enable care providers to monitor patients remotely, whether they are at home or on the move.
Telemonitoring is particularly relevant in the context of the proportional rise in our ageing population. The European Union has made telemonitoring in the health care sector one of its top priorities for 2009-2010. With this in mind, Vitalsys has developed VitalCare, an infrastructure enabling users to practice telemedicine anywhere in Europe. VitalCare is used by hospitals, medical support and insurance companies, as well as by pharmaceutical companies. In addition, Vitalsys is a distributor of professional medical equipment. By combining both activities, Vitalsys is able to register the exact requirements of its users in terms of telematics and to adapt telemedical applications accordingly.
The acquisition of Vitalsys fits in with fifthplay's company strategy for the strategic development of its platform of e-services in the care sector: "fifthplay is an innovative company with a strong focus on growth. As subsidiary of the Niko Group, we bring IT and the electronics sector together to provide solutions that improve the quality of life of the end-users. The technologies of Vitalsys meet the challenges presented by an ageing population and involved with monitoring an increasing number of chronic diseases. Telemedicine is therefore a solution that significantly increases the patients' quality of life. Vitalsys constitutes an attractive addition to our service portfolio", comments Kris van Daele, CEO of fifthplay.
More information at www.vitalsys.be and www.fifthplay.com. And make a note to meet with Vitalsys representatives at Med-e-Tel 2009. |
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Newsbriefs To follow are links to some interesting and recently published articles, studies, interviews and reports (if you would like to suggest an article for inclusion into a following newsletter, feel free to send details to info@medetel.eu):
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