‘Public hospitals are not yet acknowledging the necessity of engaging management consultants in the same way as private institutions. Management and organisational consultancy is particularly important in hospitals as it is not just undertaken for the benefit of staff but also the benefit of the patients’’ explains Verena Krassnitzer, Vienna-based management consultant and supervisor,…
‘New market dynamics’ in healthcare, with characteristics such as crowding out, internationalisation of medical services, increasing transparency of services due to the media, and price-oriented reimbursement systems, enforce quality promoting and cost-reducing labour divisions as well as cooperation of all players in healthcare provision. Professor Wilfried von Eiff, from the Centre for…
Medication errors sit among the top ten causes of harm to patients. They can, of course, occur in any department, but it’s still a surprise that they happen as frequently in anaesthetics departments, considering anaesthetists’ expertise is in handling tricky medication. However, apparently they are not the fault of the professional, but of the nature of the processes. Report: Karoline…
During the IFCC and EuroMedLab congress in Berlin, Beckmann Coulter launched into Europe its AU 5800, which, the firm reports, improves processing time compared to current systems and therefore meets the demands of ever faster workflow in clinical laboratories.
Adaptability and scalability were the buzz words at the Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics booth at this year’s IFCC-Worldlab and EuroMedLab congress. With the ongoing generation of their highperformance automation systems as an example, the company offers a multi-discipline architecture that enables a lab team to build an automation solution following their individual demands.
In late May, a particularly aggressive and new strain of enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) posed an enormous challenge for northern German hospitals. In Hamburg, the focus of the epidemic, more than 1,000 people fell ill, about 180 of them seriously, after getting into contact with the bacterium. Report: Meike Lerner
Carestream Health is one of the first healthcare IT providers to conduct pre-launch testing of the new Intel® Xeon® processor E7 product family in its industry-leading medical image management, archiving and distribution systems. These tests indicate the new high-performance processors can equip Carestream Health’s PACS and SuperPACS™ Architecture to deliver responsive access to a larger…
Major disasters and natural catastrophes occur all the time – but in most cases we are only aware of them as images in the news on our TV screens or in the newspapers. Fortunately, most European hospitals are confronted with such major events only occasionally.
Sometimes small efforts can have a big effect. In a pilot project, a team at the University of Heidelberg is studying what are the real energy guzzlers in hospitals and what cost savings can actually be achieved by simple energy saving measures.
The lives of people who find communication difficult are to be dramatically improved following a report published by Devices for Dignity (D4D), into Voice Output Communications Aids (VOCAs). The free to access report, whose development was led by Barnsley Hospital and NHS Sheffield as part of a D4D consortium, is designed to improve the development of new technologies and stimulate further…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.
With 1,600 customers and a 30-40% market share in Germany, Austria, France and Switzerland, IT and imaging enterprise Agfa and its hospital-wide IT solution Orbis are ahead of the game. Dr Volker Wetekam, Executive Vice President of the IT Division, Agfa Healthcare, speaks of a technological advantage of as much as two to three years in the key segments -- PACS, cardiology and regional health --…
Southampton University Hospitals’ Department of Laboratory Medicine has recently transformed the way it delivers its pathology service, becoming one of the largest automation installations in the National Health Service to operate under a managed service contract. This has contributed significantly to the development of a strengthened and expanded pathology network across Southern England.
In 1935, following the spectacular crash of the much-heralded Boeing B-17 bomber, it was concluded that the ‘modern plane was too much for one man to fly’. Similarly, given the complexity of modern healthcare, medicine is rarely a solo pursuit. In 1977, following the largest commercial aviation crash to date, flight investigators concluded the crew had ‘failed to take the time to become a…
The application of ergonomic principles can enhance product design and, more importantly, the usability of medical devices. Ideally the operation of the product is adaptable to the individual user’s preferences and to different workflows, for example when safe handling is ensured in routine as well as in emergency situations.
Whether it’s functional imaging via MRI or CT, dynamic angiography examinations or volume tomography -- new examination procedures deliver more, but also require more. The annual data increase in hospitals is 20-30% and the resulting requirements for the necessary storage capacity, or for digital data transfer, present a serious challenge. Accordingly, there is considerable interest in…
Smooth, flawlessly running reprocessing systems ensure regulatory hygiene standards as well as the constant availability of all endoscopes. To this end, along with the established Partnership and Complete Coverage Contracts for endoscopy, Olympus Deutschland GmbH has developed CDS Care and CDS Care+ Contracts and a Validation Service.
The Siemens sector Healthcare has developed the new consulting model “Act on Stroke”, tailored specifically to clinical workflows in the treatment of stroke. Following models for industry processes, an expert team from Siemens evaluates the maturity level of clinical processes in a hospital.
The project consortium Alarm has developed new software to enable a computer-assisted triage-system for mass accidents and catastrophes. Torsten Schröder, emergency physician at the Charité Clinic for Anaesthesiology, with the focus on operative Intensive Care Medicine in Berlin, gave a mid-term review of the project and explained the advantages of the IT-supported triage-system for…
An RFID transponder (also known as a tag) consists of a chip and tiny antenna. Thanks to their small size these transponders can be integrated into almost any object, including clothing, boxes or even sheets of paper. Thus the logistics industry numbers amongst the prolific areas of application for wireless frequency identification using RFID (radio frequency identification) technology.