Editorial
Letter From the Executive Director,HITM
Dear Reader, This issue of our journal marks the second year of publication a significant milestone for many organisations. It also corresponds to the start of a period when healthcare IT moves up Europe’s policy agenda. The EU’s new Seventh Framework Programme on research highlights healthcare as one of seven key Challenges for the future. Explicit healthcare IT elements are also found in several ot...
HITM News
The European Associations 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 responsibility of healthcare IT managers and representing...
Zorg and ICT Utrecht
This year’s Zorg & ICT annual event was held in Jaarbeurs, Utrecht from March 14-16, and was attended by over 110 exhibitors and 6,200 visitors. Cure and care professionals from both large and small health care organisations, hospitals, the government, health insurers and media visited the event. This was an all time record for year-on-year growth in participation, of 25%. A random selection of...
Personal Health System to Empower Patients
The European Commission’s Personal Health Systems (PHS) conference was held at the European Parliament in Brussels on February 12 and 13. The PHS conference focused on finding the best routes to boost the development and deployment of PHS, and the wider field of e-Health systems, in the context of an ageing society. It sought to bring together the viewpoints and perspectives of a wide range of PHS stakeh...
New Orleans Welcomes HIMSS07
The recent HIMSS07 Annual Conference & Exhibition, held February 25 -March 1, 2007 opened its doors to participants from all over the world in New Orleans, US. This year, the conference’s theme was “Where ideas become solutions”. The number of participants registered by February 18 was 25,000, comfortably exceeding last year’s figures. Steve Lieber, CEO of HIMSS, said that there was about 11% m...
EU Section
Cost-Benefit of Telecardiology
Author HITM interview with Mr. Dean Westcott HITM: Please Tell Us a Little bit About ACCA’s Role in the Telecardiology e-Health Cost/Benefit Study that was Undertaken on Dehalf of the European Commission’s Information Society and Media Directorate General ? Westcott: ACCA, as you know, is the world’s largest global professional accountancy body, with 260,000 students and 110,000 members (qua...
German Presidency and the EU Healthcare Agenda
In the healthcare sector, the German Presidency has defined health promotion, innovation and access to healthcare as its priorities. Its specific aims are: î to achieve Lisbon Agenda goals on health issues î to finalise the health action programme until 2013 î to draw a community framework on health services, patient mobility and cross-border services î to implement international health regulat...
FP7 Research Programme
What’s in IT forHealthcare IT Managers FP7 is composed of four specific programmes (see box). In a fluid fashion, these interface into seven key Research Challenges that seek to ensure Europe becomes a world leader in IT. Under the banner ‘A Healthcare Revolution’, No. 5, is an explicit opportunity for healthcare IT. The healthcare IT-related implications of the Challenges are briefly discuss...
Cover Story
Future of the European Laboratory Informations Systems Market
Author Konstantinos Nikolopoulos is a Healthcare IT Industry Analyst with Frost & Sullivan. Frost & Sullivan (www.frost.com) is a global growth consulting company, which has been partnering with clients to support the development of innovative strategies for more than 40 years. Introduction to LIS A laboratory information system (LIS) can be defined as one or more application packages...
Perspectives on Lab Automation:Past,Present and Future
Author Greg Dummer is Executive Director of the Association for Laboratory Automation (ALA). Dr. Sabeth Verpoorte is Program Chairman of the Scientific Committee at this year’s annual ALA conference. HITM: Please Tell Us a Little Bit About the History and Membership Composition of the ALA. Dummer: The Association for Laboratory Automation (ALA) was set up in 1996. The year also sa...
Product Comparison Chart
Laboratory Information Systems
ECRI (formerly the Emergency Care Research Institute) is a nonprofit health services research agency and a Collaborating Centre of the World Health Organization (WHO). Such organisations are appointed to contribute to the WHO’s public health mission by providing specialise knowledge, expertise and support in the health field to the WHO and its member nations. ECRI’s mission is to improve the safety,...
Features
A Unified Systems Engineering Methodology for Trustworthy Systems
Formal models help, but the essence is formalised thinking Eric Verhulst is director of the Open License Society. More information at www.OpenLicenseSociety.org Why Projects Fail As our systems grow in complexity, so does the software content. And software engineering as such is not yet a fully mastered discipline. According to the nowfamous CHAOS studies of The Standish group, about...
SNOMED CT-Enabling Systamatic Interoperablity Throught Clinical Terminology
Author Theo Bosma is Vice President of Global Sales at Health Language,Inc., which services the worldwide healthcare industrythrough innovative software infrastructure technologyand expertise. For cited references, pleasecontact [email protected] What is Semantic Interoperability? Selvage, Wolfson, Zurek and Kahan (2006) tell us that semantic interoperability indicates that the meaning of da...
The OFEK Health Information Network
For medical practitioners, missing clinical information is as much an everyday nuisance as hard reality. Current efforts to create health information networks (HIN) seek to directly tackle this problem. However, with a handful of exceptions, progress has been uneven. It may be several years before technically integrated, seamless and comprehensive networks emerge on a meaningful, global scale. Today,...
Reducing Security Risk to E-Health
Author Blake Suthherland is vice president of product management at Third Brigade. The New Threat Until recently, attention-seeking hackers were the main IT security threat to businesses, including healthcare organisations. These types of mass attacks often had no particular target in mind; they would simply seek out vulnerabilities in one system, exploit them – and move on to the next....
Benifits of Open Source in Healthcare
Author Shahid N. Shah is CEO of Netspective Communications, a software consultancy specialised in delivering custom healthcare software solutions. The Benefits of Open Source Visibility: If a vendor open sources its software, its visibility will be increased because it’s not proprietary and the press, competitors, partners, etc will all talk about it without thinking they are promoting a sp...
Management
Implementing a Successful Cultural Change
Author James Rizzi is Director, ComputationalTechnology, at Array BioPharma, a biopharmaceuticalcompany focused on the discovery, developmentand commercialisation of orally active drugs toaddress significant unmet medical needs. Array’s Decision on ELN: Motives and Origins In 1999, our biopharmaceutical company, Array BioPharma made a corporate decision that chemistry-based data should...
Daveloping Top Quality Teams to Modernise IT Systems
The Case of Arras Hospital Author Arnaud Hansske, MD, is the CIO of Arras Hospital. Pilot Project to Learn the Contours of Change We started out with the belief that we had to take a long and sweeping rethink about how IT and new architecture could improve and optimise the organisation of a hospital and the delivery of healthcare. The ambitious plan involved rebuilding parts of the hos...
Country Focus:Netherlands
Healthcare Reforms and IT
Ovarview Recent healthcare reforms in the Netherlands have been relatively radical. The State has been replaced as the central player in day-to-day operation of the healthcare system by private health suppliers, although the government remains responsible for accessibility and quality of healthcare. Alongside, the previous difference between public and private health insurance has been abolished....
Interview with Drs.Ellen Maat,Director of Healthcare ICT,Netherlands Health Ministry
HITM: Hospital IT departments are at the center of many changes such as e-Health and e-business. Will the new reforms have implications for hospital IT departments ? Drs. Ellen Maat: In our view, e-Health describes the application of information and communication technologies across the whole range of functions that affect the healthcare sector. e- Health can therefore function as a lever to improve the...