Hospital infection control specialists from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa are travelling to Liverpool to learn how an English hospital Trust has become a world leader in infection prevention and control, Mark Nicholls reports
Bacteria, viruses and fungi are killed on copper surfaces within seconds. This powerful germicidal effect, termed ‘contact killing’, is increasingly noted by hospitals due to several recent studies that confirm its antimicrobial effects.
For technology suppliers the potential return on investment in medical images storage via cloud computing will not be lightning fast, market analyst for healthcare IT Theo Ahadome told EH correspondent Michael Reiter
In a market dominated by consolidations and falling prices, aiming to double turnover within three years requires either possession of the Philosopher’s Stone or extremely large amounts of creativity, entrepreneurial spirit and boldness. Diagnostics expert Unilabs, headquartered in Switzerland, belongs to the latter category.
For some, ‘life’s a bitch’ with unfairness and suffering an integral part of it. Many more people actually do not expect any better than the barrenness and misery in which they live, EH Malta Correspondent Moira Mizzi reflects.
Are surgeons still opting for surgical procedures solely for medical need – or are economics forcing their decisions? That vexatious question, posed at the 129th Congress of the German, was spurned at the outset by Markus W Büchler MD, President of the Society and Medical Director of the Department of General, Visceral and Transplant Surgery at University Hospital Heidelberg. ‘We surgeons…
Her Majesty the Queen officially opened the new state-of-the-art South West Acute Hospital, in the Northern Ireland town of Enniskillen on June 26th. The £276 million hospital is the first hospital to be built in Northern Ireland in more than a decade.
Integrated care in Europe is primarily offered in regional networks. An international symposium in Berlin showed that new forms of care require innovative ideas and a tenacious team, Susanne Werner reports
One month after entering into operational mode for real-world exchanges of patient summaries, the large-scale project Smart Open Services for European Patients (epSOS) was back at the European Connectathon to introduce new member nations to the expanding network.
Agfa HealthCare extends managed services platform to cloud host ICIS - its Imaging Clinical Information System - and enable facilities in the U.S. to image-enable their EMR.
Embarking on any business enterprise is never a small feat, but when that business is healthcare the task becomes gargantuan – and even greater if opening a healthcare facility in a country where the economies of scale create immediate difficulties. There’s also the problem of the main competitor being the free-of-charge public sector.
Under a new health delivery Act only seriously ill in-patients will receive out-patient treatment at the same hospital. The rest will have to go to a new ‘medical specialist service’. The new system can only cause problems say medical workers. Report: Susanne Werner.
Modernisation and a financing model facilitate savings of up to 50% in primary energy consumption. Every year, European hospitals face energy costs in the €billions. In Germany, for instance, the sum is €1.7 billion.
On the occasion of International Nurses Day 2012, the International Council of Nurses calls for an increase in evidence-informed decision making and practice. Nurses are often best placed to supply important information not only about care but also about context, population health and the role of key policy and social factors.
The ACEM Medical Company’s OT - System, which includes the OT-STARLED 7 and STARLED 5, is based on advanced LED (light emitting diode) technology which, the Italian manufacturer reports, ‘…guarantees the best work conditions for surgeons and medical teams in the operating rooms.’
In many hospitals medical specialists from different fields work closely together. To give them access to centrally held information and patient data collected from admittance to discharge, hospitals increasingly use IT solutions such as the electronic patient’s record (EPR). Such installations demand an extensive data security policy and implementation plan.
Fresenius subsidiary Helios on its way to become market leader. According to a study* of company mergers, with the privatisation of hospitals, Germany is in an exceptional position in Europe. No other EU country sold so many and such large hospitals so quickly as this country has done. The concept of selling entire university hospitals is unknown elsewhere in Europe.
Korea’s largest healthcare festival and the biggest in the fair’s history confirmed the event’s importance this February when the 28th Korean International Medical & Hospital Equipment Show (KIMES) proved to be an amazing show of medical technology.
Swiss surgical patients can check on and correct their treatment data and thereby facilitate reliable hospital benchmarking. In 1995, surgeons in the Biel, Burgdorf and Zurich Limmattal hospitals founded the Working Group for Quality Assurance in Surgery (AQC) to collect and compare reatment data.
Heidelberg’s doctor/nurse equal partnership concept raises staff/patient satisfaction. For the past decade the surgery and anaesthesiology departments at Heidelberg’s 340-bed University Hospital have encouraged cooperation between doctors and nurses that has set the standard for other hospitals within its remit.
A new transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) system for transapical treatment of severe aortic stenosis – Acurate TA and delivery system –is a second- generation TAVI device to treat elderly patients. Launched by the Swiss firm Symetis SA, the system gained CE approval last September is on sale in Europe.
A €35,000 DRG reimbursement for TAVI has put Germany in the lead for this procedure – and prompted sharp competition and disputes between cardiologists and cardio-surgeons, Holger Zorn reports.
Cuts in pharmaceuticals spending, doctors’ jobs threats, A&E closures, non-payments to medical suppliers – can a new government save their country and its NHS by massive stringency and tax hikes? Our correspondent Dr Eduardo de la Sota Guimón reports.
Italian healthcare is still hitting the headlines. Although Prime Minister Mario Monti announced plans for healthcare reform at the end of 2011 – effectively cutting healthcare spend by €2.5 billion, as well as increasing the retirement age – the on-going exposure of hospitals and emergency care failures is drawing huge attention and has even prompted investigations by state prosecutors.…
The IHE European Connectathon to be held in Bern, Switzerland, from 21-25 May 2012 will expand this year to include European nations connecting health records in the large-scale European Patient Smart Open Service (epSOS) project and will host satellite meetings for key e-health organisations.