"Our mission is to provide superior home care and to ensure the satisfaction of each person we serve. As a leading home care provider, our company seeks out the most efficient and effective way to deliver care. We chose the Cardiocom telemonitoring system because we felt it provided the best opportunity for our organization to truly impact the quality of care we deliver and positively impact the patients and communities we serve," says Michelle Springfield, RN, BSN, Senior Vice President/Chief Operations Officer, At Home Healthcare.

Cardiocom's telehealth system provides an interactive opportunity to proactively manage patient care. Every day, At Home Healthcare patients use the Cardiocom Commander Telehealth System to communicate with an At Home Healthcare nurse. The Commander Home Telehealth System guides the patient through an interactive Health Check that includes the collection of symptoms, care plan compliance, and vital signs such as weight, blood pressure, oxygen saturation and heart rate. This information is immediately transmitted over a standard phone line or a cellular signal to the patient's nurse for review.

"The Cardiocom System is a key tool that proactively ensures coordinated care from a hospital, nursing home or clinic to the patient's home," adds Beverly Bowman, Director of Medicare, At Home Healthcare. "This telemonitoring system will improve the quality of care for our patients."

Based on Aerotel's highly successful GeoSKeeper personal safety and location system, the new 24 hours by 7 days a week service, operated by Elemental Technologies, enables finding the accurate location and providing immediate assistance to elderly persons or people with dementia, offering users and family members safety and peace of mind.

GeoSKeeper is a wrist-worn mobile GPS-based personal safety device. It offers users and their families a new level of safety and peace of mind using its mobile phone technology, built-in speakerphone and active GPS receiver. When the user wanders outside a specified zone, or enters a dangerous area, the system sends automatic alerts via txt messages (SMS) and email, including GPS location data to a monitoring center as well as to a relative or a caregiver. GeoSKeeper enables two-way voice calls and is fully programmable over the air via a user-friendly web-based portal.

• Asociacion Chilena de Informatica en Salud (Chile)  

And also two more institutional members:

• Universidad Militar Nueva Granada (Colombia) 
• i2Cat Foundation (Spain)

Info about all member organizations can be found through the ISfTeH member directory.

Member news
The Universidad Militar Nueva Granada (UMNG), new institutional member in the ISfTeH, is a national public institution that promotes dialogue, interaction and academic community building. In 1978, as a result of the idealistic conception of the medical staff at the Central Military Hospital, the School of Medicine and Health Sciences was founded, beginning its work in the first semester of 1979. The UMNG has been recognized for its high quality and excellence at national and international levels by encouraging reflection, creativity, continuous learning, research and innovation from a global perspective, in compliance with social responsibility that allows to anticipate, propose and develop solutions that meet the needs of the defense sector but also of the society as a whole.

The new ICN eHealth Programme, which was launched on 6 May 2011 at the International Council of Nurses (ICN) Conference in Malta,aims to transform nursing through the visionary application of information and communication technology. With policies and strategies applicable to ICN's internal programmes and external partnerships, the ICN eHealth programme seeks to advance nurses' knowledge of and involvement in eHealth worldwide. The programme encompasses the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP®), a terminology that supports standarddescription and comparison of nursing practice locally, regionally, nationally and internationally, and the ICN Telenursing Network which aims to involve and support nurses in the development and use of telehealth technologies and which collaborates closely with the ISfTeH Telenursing Working Group. The Telenursing Network, which was launched in 2009, now has more than 170 members representing more than 50 countries. Concurrent with the launch of the new programme, the first issue of the ICN eHealth Bulletin was distributed in June 2011.  A major goal of the bulletin is to inform readers about developments, issues, products, publications, and conferences. The new bulletin can also support nurses and others to meet their ICT challenges and demonstrate leadership in the application of ICT to healthcare. 

Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU and father of Free Software, has declared GNU Health an official GNU Package. It will make GNU Health reach even more health centers around the world, as well as having a larger community.

As a result, most of GNU Health services will be now be hosted at GNU.org. GNU offers world-wide access, direct download and ads-free environment.

GNU Health is a free Health and Hospital Information System with EMR and HIS functionality. Its goal is to contribute with health professionals around the world to improve the lives of the underprivileged, providing a free system that optimizes health promotion and disease prevention.

Events
In the next weeks, the ISfTeH and/or its members will actively contribute to, organize or support many conferences and meetings around the world. To follow are links to just a few of these international events:  

• 2nd National Telemedicine Congress (Berlin, Germany)
• Launch of the Global eHealth Ambassadors Program (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) 
• Telemedicon 11 International Telemedicine Congress 2011 (Mumbai, India)
• International Telecare and Telehealth Conference (London, UK)
• 4th eHealth 2011 Conference (Malaga, Spain) 
• 2011 E-Health and Bioengineering Conference (Iasi, Romania)
• eHealth & Telemed 2011 (London, UK) 
• AFRIHealth 2011 (Nairobi, Kenya)
• Successes and Failures in Telehealth, 2nd Annual Meeting of the Australasian Telehealth Society (Brisbane, Australia) 

If you are heading a national telemedicine/eHealth organization, if you offer telemedicine products and solutions, if you are doing research on telemedicine and eHealth applications and technologies, if your organization provides (or wants to offer) care services by means of telemedicine/eHealth technologies, or if you are engaged in healthcare policy, join the ISfTeH network to expand your global reach or to learn from existing experiences and best practices. Membership information is available here . Or send an e-mail with your question or membership request.