Improving the quality of healthcare, increasing the efficiency of the systems and ensuring patient empowerment - these are common goals worldwide when discussing the necessary transformation of healthcare systems to guarantee sustainable healthcare delivery in the future. The Global E-Health Forum – Hamburg 2011 will represent major stakeholders involved in designing personalised healthcare.
‘As we become more successful in the early detection and treatment of breast cancer, we tend to trivialise it. Yet one in 9 women still get breast cancer. Half of them become depressed, their partners don’t know how to react and their families are in disarray. We need to stop trivialising breast cancer. It kills women.’ So says Dr Fabienne Liebens, Head of the Saint-Pierre Hospital’s…
Agfa HealthCare announces today it has teamed up with Schiller America Inc., a leading international manufacturer and supplier of electrocardiographs, stress and cardiopulmonary exercise testing, long-term ambulatory Holter ECG and blood pressure recorders, spirometers, medical IT solutions, patient monitors and external defibrillators.
Healthcare facilities in Europe are currently working to create a unified digital patient record. In tandem, medical imaging vendors are developing and offering cardiology information systems (CIS) with advanced functionalities and easy integration capabilities with enterprise-wide information systems. As a result of such trends, image management-based information systems are set to witness…
Breathtaking though the rate of improvement in medical imaging systems may be, many hospitals remain locked into their various evolutionary stages – depending on their needs and capabilities. With its versatile portfolio, Carestream Health, provides choices to meet their diverse circumstances.
Debuting at the AACC meeting was the first free mobile application to help consumers decipher their own medical tests. Created for use on an iPhone, iPad and Android smartphone, the Lab Tests Online app connects to a site promising to provide reliable, unbiased information that enables them to have more informed conversations with their doctors.
Led by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, the United Kingdom’s Labour government proudly launched its National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in 2002, a forward-looking plan with huge budget to match. The following year the nation was awed by something akin to a gold rush, as information technology companies scrambled to compete for and gain healthcare IT contracts from the £12 billion project.…
The clinical informatics firm ICNet International Ltd, which develops case management and surveillance software, has produced a software package using the SSI (Surgical Site infection surveillance) Monitor to combine information about patient movements in a hospital with data held by the laboratory and theatre systems -- and to alert staff if a patient is either infected or at risk of contracting…
Shimadzu, world-wide manufacturer of diagnostic imaging equipment, has introduced the first wireless flat-panel detector (FPD) for its mobile, fully digital X-ray system MobileDaRt Evolution. This new CXDI-70C detector generation is the next evolutionary step for mobile X-ray applications.
2011 The American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) has published the program for its 2011 Annual Meeting being held July 23 – 28 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA. This year the Annual Meeting features almost 300 individual educational events in a variety of formats. Hot topics for 2011 include cancer, obesity, diabetes, and healthcare reform.
The 3-day Med-e-Tel congress on e-Health, telemedicine and health ICT, drew over 300 international participants this April, when the organiser, International Society for Telemedicine & eHealth (ISfTeH) in Zurich, also held its annual general meeting.
To meet the high demands of today’s radiological environment, a PACS must provide far more than archiving, controlling and distribution of electronic data. Post processing and upgradable network structuring capabilities are just as important to guarantee efficient workflow. The Visage Thin Client looks like a smart solution indeed.
A mix of hardware, software and services, the Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR) system draws together all patient data from many information sources, thus providing quicker and better use of records. At Hitachi Data Systems, Mark Clark explained: ‘HCR basically provides the infrastructure to put together both clinical and non-clinical data into a centralised, non-proprietary-repository to…
The global software provider TeraRecon is recognised for strong clinical applications containing advanced image processing and 3-D visualisation for CT, MRI and PET. Since May 2010, this Silicon Valley company (Frost & Sullivan’s 2010 ‘Company of the Year Award’ winner, for European Advanced Visualisation Applications) has been expanding its core business into cloud computing services…
The new cloud hovering over the IT industry bodes pleasant and sunny business weather. Reason enough for the organisers of CeBIT 2011, the large international IT event held in Hanover this March, to make ‘cloud computing’ the keynote theme, dubbed ‘Work and Life with the Cloud’. EH reporter Walter F Schäfer questions what cloud computing is and what promise it might hold for healthcare…
Preliminary results from a large, ongoing study involving medical staff in 11 hospitals in six European countries indicate that Dell’s Mobile Clinical Computing (MCC) system has made the use of applications easier for doctors and nurses, significantly increased efficiency in IT management and raised IT acceptance in the hospitals involved.
Doctors who used a free iPhone application provided by the UK Resuscitation Council performed significantly better in a simulated medical emergency than those who did not, according to a study in the April issue of Anaesthesia.
ContextVision, the software imaging partner for the most recognized medical imaging manufacturers worldwide, today introduced two innovative solutions at the 2011 European Congress of Radiology (ECR). A mammography solution addresses current limitations of x-ray image diagnosis for the detection of breast cancer, while the interventional radiology solution helps achieve superior, real-time images…
These are exciting times for Carestream. The former film supplier is morphing into a genuine IT provider. Since its incorporation in 2007, the company has been investing many resources in the development of its portfolio with products that include systems for medical and dental imaging, IT solutions, molecular imaging and digital X-ray as well as digital products for non-destructive testing.
For 170 years, the German firm seca has set worldwide standards for medical scales and measuring stations. Today, its products are used by medical teams in 110 countries, measuring a range of patients from tiny premature babies to adults weighing 300kg and basket ball players soaring to 7’ 4” high.
This March, Dräger Medical will bring to the bedside of respiratory patients an innovative new monitor that vividly shows, breath-by-breath, their response to treatment. After shifting a patient’s position, or adjusting the respirator setting, or delivering a drug to open airways, physicians and nurses will be able to watch in real-time the response inside the patient’s lungs.
People are confronted daily with finding their way in new buildings and building complexes. Generally these are intricate, have numerous sections distributed among different houses and/or floors. Whether in hospitals, rehabilitation clinics, airports, or other large building complexes, finding the way to a particular destination can be an extremely difficult or even an impossible undertaking.
Simply adding technology is not enough. Technology is transforming what’s possible in medicine, but its complexity makes understanding how it will improve patient’s lives a challenge. Technology should drive efficiencies, reduce costs and empower people to integrate Health IT into daily routines for the betterment of care. The Dell Virtual hospital is an interactive destination for…
Necessity is the mother of invention, an old saying but particularly true in interventional radiology. Whenever minimally invasive procedures need monitoring from different angles and by different modalities, physicians and technicians in angio labs muster all their DIY skills and build huge monitor towers often with eight screens. Now, however, the new Large Display jointly developed by Siemens…
With over 6,000 employees serving over 50 different departments, the 1,062-bed university hospital UZ Gent is Belgium’s largest single hospital campus. Managing all the imaging data from such a huge institution – as well as establishing a network with about 30 partner hospitals and other caregivers – suggests a quite tricky task. Tricky, but not impossible, as Professor Bart Sijnave, Chief…
