Editorial

Dear Readers, It seems that exciting times lie ahead for healthcare IT. As policymakers and health system managers seek to improve business processes and contain costs, there is a growing consensus that more intelligent, innovative and integrated healthcare systems are just around the corner. Our cover story reviews the state of play in healthcare IT in Europe, in light of increased public expectations f...

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...

Assistance Publique - Hopitaux De Paris (AP-HP) to Choose Agfa Healthcare Agfa HealthCare has announced the winning of a contract to install its ORBIS (TM) solution at 37 hospitals in France, belonging to the Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) group. The project is regarded as one of the most ambitious deployments of a healthcare IT solution in Europe, as AP-HP admits more than one million...

Ge Healthcare to Acquire Agility Healthcare Solutions Agility’s AgileTrac technology provides the most comprehensive enterprise resource management, asset tracking, and clinical workflow solution in the healthcare industry. Agility offers a technology platform that provides enterprise visibility and management of patient flow, assets, beds and rooms, staff, emergency department activities, surgical ser...

Radcentre Launch in the Netherlands RadCentre radiology information system, a modern, scalable product designed for use in practices and hospitals, is going to be implemented shortly in the Netherlands. Rad Centre is already used by healthcare organizations in Germany, Switzerland, Romania, Hungary, Poland and Greece. Installations range from small practices to large university hospitals with hundreds of...

Sectra to Provide Northern Ireland with Wide Radiology IT System Northern Ireland will implement an integrated solution for managing radiology information and images (RIS/PACS) provided by the Swedish IT and medical technology company Sectra through a ten-year agreement. The solution will be used throughout the entire public healthcare system in Northern Ireland. The contract is valued at GBP 30 mi...

Advia Central Link Networking Solution Recently launched by Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, Version 12 of the ADVIA Central Link Networking Solution provides a consolidated environment for the management of information, laboratory results, and workflow – both for automated and nonautomated customers. It facilitates communication between the laboratory information system (LIS), automation systems, conne...

Health eCard initiative Launch in Bulgaria The first electronic prescription in Bulgaria was issued and presented at an event presided over by the Bulgarian Minister of Health, Prof. Radoslav Gajdarski, and the Minister of Public Administration and Administrative Reform, Dr. Nikolay Vassilev. The online transaction officially launched the pilot system for the Bulgarian electronic health card (eCard)....

Italian GPs to Receive X-Rays Online Italy’s San Salvatore Hospital in the Abruzzo Region has announced the development and adoption of a new radiology information system module from Carestream Health. The Italian-language module allows GPs to directly book digital x-ray examinations for their patients and receive feedback about the examination, together with the accompanying report and the image...

Telemedicine Laboratory at Gigantesque Dimensions Researchers, stakeholders and health authorities are building one of the biggest test beds for new telemedicine services. The Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine (NST) is the lead partner in this massive project, and research manager at NST, Gunn-Hilde Rotvold, presented her vision: “Troms County will be a laboratory for developing and piloting future ICT...

Telemedmeeting 2008 The Fondation franco-suisse pour la Recherche et la Technologie is organizing the 2nd edition of the TelemedMeeting 2008, to take place on the 14th of Novembre in Genève-Archamps. Organized under the form of workshops, Telemed- Meeting 2008 aims to gather players from different e-Health systems to exchange ideas and bestpractices in the field. In addition, the event points at t...

Scottish Health System to Receive 1m £ to Secure USB ports. NHS boards across Scotland are to share GBP 1 million to help them improve their IT security, beginning with securing USB ports.The funding, from the Scottish Government’s e-Health budget, will be used to help boards comply with new government standards. The new rules on encrypting NHS data were introduced after the discovery of paper patient...

The object of the e-Health Congress is to stimulate innovation and cooperation among ICT- related actors and experts from the Belgian healthcare sector, in order to develop and supply pro ducts, service offerings and solutions to the healthcare sector in Belgium. Organized as a service to the community of people and institutions involved in increasing the effectiveness of ICT and related technologies...

The 1st Advances in eHealth and Telemedicine International Conference took place in Warsaw, Poland, during the autumn days of 2008. The conference was designed by and for an audience of international healthcare and ICT professionals that included: clinicians and health professionals, health information technology users and buyers, directors, managers and administrators, health informatics professionals as...

Organized by the NEM (Networked and Electronic Media) European Technology Platform under the aegis of the European Commission’s DG Information Socie ty and Media with the support of the French Ministry of Industry, the Région Bretagne, the Media & Networks cluster and the St Malo Agglomeration, the first edition of the NEM Summit “Towards Future Media Internet” represented a major conference and...

EU News

EpSOS (Smart Open Services for European Patients), previously known as S.O.S. – “Smart Open Services - open eHealth initiative for a European large scale pilot of patient summary and electronic prescription” - is a Europe-wide project organized by 27 beneficiaries from twelve EU-Member States that includes ministries of health, national competence centres and industry. The key goal of epSOS, develope...

Cover

The Search for Efficiency and Cost Control Author Konstantinos Nikolopoulos is Programme Leader for Healthcare IT & Life Scien ces IT at consultants Frost & Sullivan. Healthcare systems globally, and in the European Union in particular, have been evolving and adapting in the last couple of years to the impact of an ageing population and to epidemiological changes in the context of fi...

Product Comparison

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, de dicates itself to bringing the discipline of applied scientific research in healthcare to uncover the best approaches to improving patient care. As pioneers in this s...

Management

A New Element in an Old Equation Author Guido Doucet is a Belgian PMI-certified IT consultant, previously with Philips and PwC. How times have changed? A decade ago, IT in healthcare was seen as little more than a country cousin of sectors like banking, retail, transportation or manufacturing. Its status, even in a pioneering country like the US, was summed up in 2001 in a report by the prestig...

As noted previously (page 19), healthcare is one of the only major sectors forecast to buck the major decline forecast in IT spending for 2009. To get a bird’s eyeview of the impact of the current financial crisis, we selected the Top Four companies by US market capitalization in five key healthcare sub-sectors and assessed the 52 week change in share prices, as compared to the situation at noon Oc...

Features

Author Michael Weinhara, Hospital Economist and Team Leader. Serbia’s new EHR system went live a few months ago, marking a major milestone in its efforts to leapfrog interim solutions and access the benefits of e-Health in the shortest possible period of time. Overall, the Serbian EHR is both a national e-Health backbone – allowing various health information systems to exchange data in real tim...

An Experiment in Progress Author Marius Stupu is IT Manager of SUUB, the University Hospital of Bucharest. An overview of changes in the hospital/healthcare IT system in Romania – long known for a traditionally high caliber of IT competencies - is provided below by the IT manager of one of the country’s leading medical institutions. Computerization has revolutionised human progress at...

Author Robert H. Roswell is Professor of Medicine at theOklahoma University Col lege of Medicine and a former Under Secretary for Health, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The need to reduce errors, increase economies of scale in a fragmented system, and derive efficiencies in the delivery of medical services have been the key drivers of healthcare IT in the US in recent years. However, the pa...

The Health Enterprise (IHE) Author Tim Becker and Rüdiger Simon are with the Departmentof Cardiology at the Uni -versity Hospital of Schles - wig-Holstein in Germany. Computer applications are indispensable tools in cardiology today for digital image acquisition, deployment and reviewing, and also for documentation, dose reporting, quality assurance and exam scheduling in the Cardiology Inform...

Openness/Interoperability Versus Privacy/Security Author Tosh Sheshabalaya, Both philosophically and technologically, the margins of the debate about electronic health records (EHRs) have been set by the long-running trade-off between openness and interoperability on the one hand, and privacy and security/confidentiality on the other. From Telephones to Satellites and DNA Screening a Longstand...

Author Tosh Sheshabalaya The Gartner Group, a respected IT research firm, finds that organizations usually spend up to four times upfront costs to manage their software after purchase. Some spend as much as 75 percent and more of their total IT budget on maintaining and operating existing IT systems and infrastructure. In such an environment, several innovative pricing models are being offered by vendor...

Author Catalina Ciolan ASSIST, an association of 1,800 healthcare IT professionals in Britain, has published the results of a survey on the Big Bang modernization project of the England’s National Health Service. Its findings may underscore the need for some re-evaluation of the parameters and objectives of major healthcare IT projects, especially those seeking to make Europe e-Health ready. Th...

The Klinik am Eichert in Göppingen (Germany) Breaks New Ground Author Joachim Hiller and Timo Baumann are respectively Heads of theBiomedical Department andof the Department Service Centre IT and Org anisationat the Klinik am Eichert inGöppingen, Germany. Information technology and biomedical technology are subject to constant adaptation. This is particularly clear in the field of biomedical...

Country Focus: Eastern Europe

A Multi-Speed, Multi-Dimensional Matrix of Change Though generally behind their counterparts in central Europe (the Country Focus in our previous issue), significant developments are also underway in the healthcare systems in eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine). As in central Europe, a major driver is the impact of transition from the Communistera systems inherited by each c...

Serbia Serbia’s e-Health vision is part of the government’s September 2005 position paper: National Strategy for an Information Society in Serbia. This defines the main issue as “the implementation of an infrastructure to provide for medical care, disease prevention, and health education on-line.” In general, the Strategy Paper acknowledges that health information systems in the country “...


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