Editorial

Dear Reader, 2011 has already brought some exciting developments within the European Association of Healthcare IT Managers (HITM), which recently elected both Dr. Josep M. Picas i Vidal, CIO from the University Clinic Sant Pau in Barcelona, Spain as President and Mr. Miroslav Madjaric, CIO from the University Hospital Centre in Zagreb, Croatia as Vice President. Furthermore, we are pleased to welcome new...

HITM News

  Dr. Josep M. Picas is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Hospital de St. Pau in Barcelona, Spain. He began his career in 1974 as a medical doctor, was appointed Director of the Hospital de l'Esperança in 1979 and Director of the Barcelona Town Council Primary Health Care Services in the C.Q. Peracamps in 1984. He served as Medical Director of Municipal Institute of Healthcare Services from 198...

  The winning solution, Healthcare for the Rural Poor, combines technology with village entrepreneurs acting as facilitators to connect rural communities with formally qualified urban doctors. Using remote medical diagnostics integrated with audiovideo conferencing software this project enables patients from villages to access efficient and specialised healthcare in their areas. Second place was awarded...

    Citizens logged in with their digital signature to their personal page on the Danish portal for citizens Borger.dk can now access their patient records and make use of a full range of health-related e-services. The 'My Health Summary' service allows them to have an overview of their health information prescriptions, hospital stays, electronic health records, status of test results, organ donation...

    The national IT support for event analysis was launched in March 2011, to facilitate the analysis of events which lead to serious patient injuries occurring in healthcare. The idea is that by centralising these event analyses, resources can be pooled, enabling the development of more effective ways to prevent patient injury in the future. The aim of the NITHA project is to develop an IT support sy...

It has been nearly ten years since GPs in Northern Norway fi rst integrated telemedicine, making it possible to send referrals and receive discharge summaries electronically. Over the next three years this will be expanded with nursing and care services in all municipalities located in the northern region communicating electronically with GPs and health authorities. Electronic message exchange (EME) will...

  The Portuguese General Directorate of Health has created the 'Health 2.0: Quality and Innovation in the National Health Service' project aimed at identifying the main requirements in health innovation.The project is in the form of an online survey that seeks to identify strategic priorities for innovation in the health sector.The survey is open to all users of the National Health Service or health unit...

Exhibitors @ RSNA 2010

  SCM Microsystems, a leading provider of solutions for secure access, secure identity and secure exchange recently announced that it has received its first orders for 10,000 e-health terminals to support the relaunch of the electronic health card programme in Germany. SCM has begun shipping both its e-health200 desktop and e-health 500 mobile health card terminals for the programme, which involves the...

  In April, CSC announced it has signed an agreement to acquire all of the outstanding equity of iSOFT Group Limited, one of the world's largest providers of advanced healthcare IT solutions, by way of a court-approved scheme of arrangement. The acquisition will complement and strengthen CSC's market-leading software products and healthcare integration and services portfolio, while enhancing its healthca...

  Philips Healthcare has announced the opening of the world's first hybrid OR with new FlexMove – a ceiling-mounted option for the Allura Xper x-ray system, designed to optimise workflow in hybrid ORs – at the University Hospital Zürich (UniversitätsSpital Zürich, USZ), Switzerland. A hybrid OR is the integration of a surgical operating room with an advanced x-ray imaging system. This enables car...

Cover Story

A crucial challenge facing the development sector is the inability of communities living in rural and hinterland areas, which often account for 75 percent of the population in developing countries, to access vital health and reproductive health services. For over 60 years, the focus was on strengthening the public sector for this responsibility. In countries where this has worked – Iran, Cuba, Vietnam t...

  Benefits for the Healthcare User Most hospital systems have traditionally been "silo-based", expensive to maintain and infl exible. In contrast, all patient and hospital related information and processes are streamlined and integrated into one single clinical holistic system improving the quality of data. The focus of our approach was: Uniformity for the healthcare user by re-use hence minimising train...

  One of the main problems in the operation of complex hospital information systems (hIS) is a lack of functionality for the deep integration of administrative and clinical patient data, documents, reports, which are generated and stored in a variety of different software modules or specifi c clinical applications. These proprietary systems often use their own data models and storage routines. The custom...

In 2010, the community of Madrid launched an e-health innovation project through the creation of a Scientific Social Network for professionals. The project was initially implemented at the University General Hospital Gregorio Marañón (HGUGM), starting as a tool to support the tumour committee. For the implementation of the Scientific Social Network, the Community of Madrid decided to use MEDTING Enterp...

  Cost effectiveness and process optimisation by computer assisted structured medical documentation has been discussed for some time but has yet to be proven by code numbers. The article demonstrates the cost effectiveness of the medical documentation system MediColor for structured medical documentation by means of clear figures. This article uses a real example to prove which costs and process optimisa...

What are the overriding requirements for a hospital ICT system? High capacity and reliability, for sure. Flexibility and future-proofed, maybe. Yet most hospitals spend management time and money on individual systems like a new PAC S system or EMR customisation, ahead of sufficient investment into an efficient basis to satisfy the overriding requirements for all hospital systems. St. Olavs Hospital in Tron...

  The global demand for interoperability within healthcare is increasing in order to provide the services needed in healthcare today. This situation is also reflected in the Västra Götaland region (VGR) on the western coast of Sweden. Studies illustrate that relatively few healthcare organisations have developed sustainable interoperable solutions with an enterprise scope (Ebbert et al. 2007; Mendelson...

Catalonia is an autonomous community inside Spain and has full powers regarding its citizens' healthcare. It is developing a National Healthcare System that grants assistance to every citizen, over seven million in 2006, and where different services are requested to different providers. The ICT Strategic Plan 2008 – 2011 focuses on two groups: Citizens and professionals. The plan seeks to guarantee citi...

  The Health Department (HD) has responsibility to draw up the health policies, ensure the system's sustainability and oversee the quality of services. It has the legal authority to authorise, inspect and also close down activities and centres, both from the public and the private system. Furthermore, it has the functions of planning health and services policies. One of the challenges for the HD was th...

Features

Technology evaluation is considered a must in today's healthcare systems, especially when a significant monetary investment is required. Such evaluation is to be conducted before the introduction of a new technology by means of a multidisciplinary approach that should take every aspect into account. Evaluations can also useful as a follow-up verification, especially in cases where little literature is ava...

  Despite the widespread adoption of the DICOM standard in medical imaging, it can still be challenging to share data across institutions. Too often simple yet inefficient means of sharing data are used due to the lack of fast and secure mechanisms that support interactive access to data resources from outside institutional firewalls.Virtual PACS, a mechanism for standardised, efficient and secure access...

  COSARA (Computerised Surveillance and Alerting of nosocomial infections, Antimicrobial Resistance and Antibiotic consumption in the ICU) is a software application designed and developed for the registration and integration of infection-related data in the ICU patient. The application architecture consists of three different software modules: 1) A registration module which in real-time requires the ICU-...

Interview

  Cyprus is the third largest Mediterranean island after Sicily and Sardinia, situated 60 km south of Turkey and 300 km north of Egypt. Cyprus is a divided island. In general, access to information concerning the northern part of the island is limited. Thus, this article refers to the Republic of Cyprus. Cyprus' estimated population is 730,000 of which 87.5 percent belongs to the Greek Cypriot communit...

  Telemedicine is evolving in Cyprus, with some forms of telemedicine in common practice in many fields of medicine throughout the country. Our aim is to incorporate telemedicine in everyday practice in Cyprus, especially as the whole island is covered with state of art telecommunications. Health technology projects already implemented in Cyprus include the following: RIS/PACS internet gateway system;...


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