Yesterday a newly redesigned website for IHE-Europe opened a window on the accelerating movement to electronic records across Europe, giving a new visibility to successful programs. The website at www.ihe-europe.net features links to five pan-European initiatives, nine national programs, and highlights success stories from regional implementations.
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 --…
SECure TRAnsmission, the main aim of a spin-off from the Linköping Institute of Technology, was established in 1978. From this beginning, the Swedish firm Sectra has evolved into one of the world’s leading players in PACS and mammography solutions. Although secure communication systems remains a core business, the medical section has constantly grown since 1988, when Dr Torbjörn Kronander…
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.
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.
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.
While other industries race towards an all-digital world, healthcare remains frozen in the Analogue Age. However, the success of established, world-leading e-health programmes in Denmark, Andalusia and Lombardy, have built confidence in secure patient data exchanges.
The Swiss-based World Medical Centre Holding SA and German Centre for Travel Ltd. medicine have launched, an international personal medical record system -- the CRM travel.CARD – for travellers to keep their essential medical data with them at all times. Representatives of the two firms, both specialised in travel medicine, presented the CRM travel.CARD at a press conference this January in…
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…
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…
Chemical substances can bring miracles: they kill bacteria, prevent viral multiplication or stop cancer cell growth. Thus they offer a huge reservoir of potential drugs. However, seeking substances and their biological effects is a mammoth task and cannot be undertaken alone. The Preparatory Phase Project EU-OPENSCREEN (European Infrastructure of Open Screening Platforms for Chemical Biology) was…
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…
At Medica 2009, Julie Shimer, CEO of Welch Allyn, described her company’s future plans in an interview with European Hospital. Medica 2010 brought us another opportunity to meet, this time to hear how those aims were achieved in the past year.
Philips introduced the Philips IntelliSpace Portal, a multimodality workspace that uses advanced networking capabilities to facilitate collaboration between radiologists and referring clinicians that may lead to faster, more accurate and informed patient care. Featured at the 96th annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North American (RSNA) in Chicago, the IntelliSpace Portal turns…
Since Siemens Healthcare launched syngo.via, its imaging software for multimodality reading of clinical cases, clinicians worldwide are reporting significant workflow efficiency gains. More than 100 installations of syngo.via have been delivered worldwide, and healthcare organizations are already benefiting from the advantages of syngo.via embedded in their clinical routine with advanced…
This year at the 96th annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago, Philips was ushering in a new era in radiology science with Imaging 2.0, a concept fueled by integration of technology, clinician and patient.
A senior IT executive has warned hospitals of the need to create an effective healthcare disaster recovery strategy to protect the huge increases in digital information they are now generating. With a growth in electronic patient records and digital imagery, it is now estimated that 30% of the world’s digital storage is found in healthcare.
What connects these: dementia research; the development of a procedure for fast, cost efficient gene sequencing; protein research; modern IT infrastructures, and the determination of reimbursement structures for medical procedures? Answer: Two extremely small common denominators: Bits and bytes. This means data and, increasingly, mass data, which now forms the foundation of medicine. The question…
Ethianum Heidelberg is going over to total paperless communication. The value is evident in the first step in new patient admissions. For their online medical history the hospital is using LifeSensor from InterComponentWare (ICW).
Europe would cope much better with some of its most urgent social challenges if it was to fully utilize the entire potential of information and communication technology. These challenges include the ageing population, rising healthcare costs and the integration of the disabled. This is stated in the European Commission’s digital agenda for Europe. The digital agenda 2020 is one of the topics at…
When seca gmbh & co. kg presents the new product system seca 360° wireless at MEDICA 2010, the focus will be on saving time when weighing, measuring and analyzing results, preventing measurement errors, streamlining the analysis and presentation of measurements and optimizing patient consultation. Developed specifically in response to the needs of medical weighing and measuring, the futuristic…
The United Kingdom’s diagnostic imaging departments are not only dealing with an increasing workload of over 10% per annum but also with the growing sophistication of MR and CT scanners. They need and are looking for solutions to deal with an almost exponential data explosion. This daily overload has to be managed in telemedicine network data sharing environments as well as in long-term…
e-health is now very much on the political agenda, recognised as a key enabler for delivering better healthcare and choice for patients. In this article Dr Harald Deutsch, Vice President CSC Healthcare EMEA, explains why he believes we are entering an era of the “normalisation” of e-health and how the convergence of technology standards will be a key driver for success. He also explores how…
Held every three years, a very important healthcare IT event is to be held in Europe after a gap of 14 years. From November 15-19, healthcare managers and suppliers from 37 countries will arrive in Milan to discuss the future of world’s electronic health services at the 16th Congress of IFHRO (International Federation of Health Records Organisations), held in collaboration with the WHO.
He was among the pioneers of hospital digitization. Way back in 1988, Professor Walter Hruby, Chair of the Institute for Radiological Diagnostics at the Donauspital Vienna, in Austria, decided that, when his hospital opened its doors, state-of-the-art technology would be implemented. Thus, in 1992, the Donauspital became Europe’s first, fully-digitised hospital. Today, recollecting that…