Editorial

Dear Reader, IT is a value-add engine to every economic sector. This is now accepted wisdom. Healthcare is no exception. Yet, healthcare IT has some special characteristics. It is more data rich and sensitive than most other economic segments. However, trends in healthcare IT spending have lagged those, for example, in banks – a sector to which it might most closely be benchmarked. The European U...

HITM 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 respo...

Austrian Hospital to Implement Personnel Administration System A personnel administration system has been implemented at Allgemeines Krankenhaus Wien (AKH), Austria. AKH in Vienna is one of the country’s biggest hospitals with 2,100 beds and 9,000 staff, including around 1,500 doctors. The software package, called ‘on duty’, will be provided by systema, a subsidiary of German IT firm Compugroup...

HIT@HEALTCARE - A Unique Joint Event (8-10 October, 2008) For the first time in the healthcare history of Belgium and The Netherlands, four e-Health professional associations have decided to join forces in order to organise an international conference and exhibition in Brussels. This event will coincide with the celebration of the 25th MIC Congress of MIM and VMBI and the 3rd SIXI International Congr...

Portuguese Health Centers to Implement Integrated Patient Record Five healthcare facilities in Portugal have implemented a hospital information system to integrate patient records. For this project, Espirito Santo Saúde (ESSAUDE), the private healthcare group that delivered the systems, partnered with vendor iSoft. Even within one month of the project, the five centers were using patient administrat...

Gemalto Service to bring Slovenia’s e-Health Cards According to Gemalto, a European digital security company, the new card to be implemented in Slovenia will be the first in Europe to feature a Java public key infrastructure (PKI), which will enhance the online health system by offering digital signatures for healthcare professionals. In 2000, Slovenia was among the very first countries, together w...

Turkish Doctors Pilot New Decision Support System European and Turkish doctors and technicians have developed a medical support system (Saphire) which can track patients’ real-time vital signs, link them to patient medical history, and provide the latest clinical guidelines for patient care. The Intelligent Clinical Decision Support System (ICDSS) can also notice the doctors when necessary and offers a r...

The European Association of Healthcare IT Managers (HITM) invites you in the month of April to Med-e-Tel, the International Educational and Networking Forum for eHealth, Telemedicine and Health ICT. Med-e-Tel offers opportunities to meet and network with telemedicine and e-Health users, researchers, care providers, policy makers and industry representatives from over 50 countries around the world. Th...

Presented by CHIME (College of Healthcare Information Management Executives) and HIMSS (The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), this year’s CIO Forum provided a breath of fresh air and a motivational mix of inspiration and strategy for over 100 attendants. The CIOs present at the Forum enjoyed the perspectives of four experts on a variety of issues. Princeton University’s Dr....

This year’s 4th session of the World Health Care Congress Europe opened its doors with an executive seminar on Innovative Care Management Services sponsored by Accenture. Dr. Thomas Zahn discussed the concept of ACMS as well as the results of their pilot in Germany and the implementation phase with Health Dialog/CNAMTS in France. During the three conference days, four concurrent summits invited experts a...

EU News

On Lead Markets for E-Health In early 2008, the European Commission requested the strengthening of national co-operation on lead market opportunities for e-Health with the aim of improving the quality of health services and an increase in economic benefits. When talking about e-Health in this context, one should go back to the Aho Report on “Creating an Innovative Europe” that recognised the importan...

In the field of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips, the European Union is losing the technological battle for mass deployment, seen as the driver of the creation of an “Internet of things,” the Commission declared. RFID chips have already been deployed at a significant scale all over the world while their implementation can be found in sectors such as the auto industry, transport (luggage retr...

Cover Story

Though their mission remains much the same as before – to deliver healthcare, hospitals have changed considerably over recent years – both in terms of appearance and content. In the face of the emergence of the new e-Health environment, one of the clearest aspects of such changes is the evolution of the Hospital Information System.with accommodation to an ever-increasing number of anytime/anywhere data...

Product Comparison Chart

ECRI Institute Europe Weltech Centre Ridgeway Welwyn Garden City Herts AL7 2AA United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)1707 871511 Fax: +44 (0)1707 393138 [email protected] www.ecri.org.uk ECRI Institute, a non-profit organisation, dedicates itself to bringing the discipline of applied scientific research in healthcare to uncover the best approaches to improving patient care. As pioneers in this scie...

Features

The Core Laboratory for Clinical Studies (CLCS) at Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis, USA, conducts testing on Phase 3 and 4 clinical trial samples. In addition to pharmaceutical sponsors, the CLCS also performs testing for Washington University School of Medicine researchers, and for clinicians who service patients. In early 2002 it was determined that the legacy Laboratory Informati...

COMPUTER-SUPPORTED DECISION MAKING: AN EVALUATION A hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU) has several characteristics which make it favourable for extensive use of information technology. Firstly, it has an overwhelming amount of data, often leading to data-overload and loss of information. Secondly, intensive care medicine has a short diagnostic-therapeutic cycle compared to other medical disciplin...

Gathering Speed, Slowly But Surely The promise of mobile solutions for healthcare has some parallels to the US Bill of Rights; its truths are self-evident. They are also the result of three convergent trends. The first is the explosion of hospital data. The second is the increasing requirement for specialist advice and care. Last but not least is the demand that healthcare intervention be delivered as cl...

If Electronic Health Record systems are to provide an effective contribution to healthcare across Europe, a set of benchmarks need to be set to ensure quality control and interoperability of systems. This article describes why EuroRec’s initiatives are important, considering the present trends where patients need to be put at the centre, clinicians be involved in the design of their applications and heal...

IT projects with healthcare implications awarded under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP-7) are ambitious in scale. Many underscore the EU’s emerging response to its e-Health agenda as well as the possibility of using IT to cope imaginatively with the challenges of an ageing population. Nevertheless, many observers in the healthcare IT community believe there is a piecemeal, pick-an...

Management

Can IT-mediated corporate governance systems derived from (and generated by) private sector companies be applied to hospitals, in particular the non-profit hospitals which underpin the European healthcare landscape ? Across most of Europe, hospital boards oversee policies/strategies, financial plans and other operational activities, and many review and occasionally contest strategic plans and directions....

Drivers exist for implementing IT services within the healthcare industry on a large scale. Their interactions, however, are highly dynamic and remain largely ad-hoc. Nevertheless, the sheer scale of hospital modernisation projects and the ever-changing opportunities offered by new networking and communications technologies combine to make telecoms companies key actors in the process. Ó Interoperabi...

Country Focus: France

France’s health system has in recent years been a paradox, both for expert observers within the country and those overseas. In June 2000, the World Health Organisation ranked the country’s healthcare system as the “best in the world”. This was in spite of the fact that in terms of standard benchmarks for high-tech healthcare, France laggedmost of Europe. In 2000, for example, it had just 180 MRI sc...

Healthcare IT in France is a mix of gems and some persistent dark spots. The former arises from its world-class ‘dirigiste’ policies for high-technology in general. The latter are mainly due to the complexities of its welfare system (in the shape of enduring healthcare budget deficits) and its generally slower adoption of the Internet – ironically, a legacy of that erstwhile Internet-like early bird,...

From the Eiffel Tower through the tail-free delta wing Mirage III fighter jet to the TGV supertrain, France has an enviable reputation for taking an iconoclastic, but surprisingly successful approach at the cutting-edge of high technology. Today, when the Internet becomes as commonplace as a dishwasher in Western households, it may be salutary to look briefly at a precursor technology, France’s Minitel s...


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