When the European Parliament voted in favour of the EU Directive on Patients’ Rights in Cross-border Healthcare, Health Commissioner John Dalli, explained that this is an important step forward for all EU patients – i.e. by gaining easier access to good quality and reimbursed treatment across EU borders. Meanwhile, Europe’s healthcare systems will need to deliver ‘more for less’.
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…
250 delegates from some 30 countries arrived in Hamburg this November to discuss e-health and share knowledge from their own countries at the first Global E-Health Forum and discuss.
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…
Aipermon GmbH & Co. KG reports that cooperations with medical device manufacturers Vitalograph and PARI Pharma have opened up new approaches to telemonitor lung patients.
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…
How does a hospital decide what to do about in-house radiology if, for example, its consultant retires? Select a ‘new broom’ to brush out earlier practices, or make this an opportunity to redefine its radiology department’s services and objectives? In the latter case, outsourcing to receive diagnoses from an external radiologist might be potentially interesting. However, Dr Winfried…
Today in most countries of the world almost 50 % of patients in hospital for a cardiac condition began their treatment as emergency cases: chest pain at home . . . a cardiac arrest in the street. Thus, according to Dr Peter Clemmensen, of the 22 million hospital admissions in Europe each year for acute cardiac events, more than 10 million of them would have begun as an emergency and without…
After years of go-slow adoption and cautious optimism, European cardiologists are now embracing remote monitoring of cardiac electrophysiology devices. ‘We are at the dawn of a new era,’ concluded Dr Philippe Ritter, Chairman of the Cardiostim 2010 congress, after reviewing findings of studies that delivered unequivocal evidence that remote monitoring is not only a safe alternative to clinic…
In the historical city of Gouda, in the Netherlands, the 441-bed Groene Hart Ziekenhuis (Green Heart Medical Centre) employs about 150 doctors and serves a local population of 450,000 people. Last September it became the first hospital in Europe to install the new Carestream Cardiology PACS. Launched in 2009, the PACS provides a single integrated platform for diagnosis, reporting, storage and…
GE and Intel Corporation have announced the entry into a definitive agreement to form a 50/50 joint venture to create a new healthcare company focused on telehealth and independent living. The new company will be formed by combining assets of GE Healthcare’s Home Health division and Intel’s Digital Health Group, and will be owned equally by GE and Intel.
Given the task of archiving today’s huge data files, not to mention additional services demanded of hospital IT staff, cloud computing could reduce many headaches. Via a healthcare IT supplier that offers cloud computing, a hospital would be able to use, over the Web, virtual hardware that provides higher levels of storage capacity and computing resources.
A study* to assess the usability of hospital IT in Germany by focusing on effectiveness (functionality), efficiency (software ergonomics) and application support, has been published by the German association of manufacturers of healthcare IT solutions (Verband der Hersteller von IT-Lösungen im Gesundheitswesen – VHITG).
Renewing Health is the Veneto Region’s response to the third Call of Proposals by the European Information Communication Technology Policy Support Programme (ICT-PSP). The project, which falls under the ICT-PSP financing plans, aims to facilitate the use of ICT-based solutions and services for citizens, the government, and businesses, as well as aiding their diffusion throughout Europe.
The teaching hospital in Olomouc aims to become a national centre for telemedicine. A telemedicine system is currently used by the hospital’s Internal Medicine Department 1 for cardiac patients and almost a hundred patients are remotely monitored via a telesystem implemented by the hospital.
The Health Informatics Congress held in the UK this April, revealed how IT is helping health Trusts across the UK to take innovative steps in the way they respond to patients’ needs. The Clinical Showcase session examined how Trusts are coping with new patient administration and reporting systems and, in particular, how Cerner Millennium and Lorenzo systems are being implemented.
In April, the Asklepios Future Hospital (AFH) Programme, a multinational cooperation of 25 business partners, gained a new partner, Prof. Rupert Gerzer, Director of the German Aerospace Centre, an expert in distance medical services. In a partnership begun over five years ago with Microsoft and Intel, Asklepios designed the AHF to develop special hospital and entire healthcare system information…
A telemedicine project is being used in rural areas of eastern England to enable stroke patients to receive clot-busting drugs within a critical three-hour time window. Adapting video-conferencing facilities, a telestroke service has enabled patients to receive a diagnosis from a stroke specialist, who can authorise thrombolytic drugs to be administered to those deemed eligible.
Physicians connected with the Friesland Regional Cardiology Network can now consult in real- time with specialists at the regional medical centre to determine the best course of treatment for their patients. The cardiology network not only speeds up the referral process and improves both diagnosis and the clinical decision process, but also is credited with reducing the length of stay for…
In 2011 more than 30,000 hospital caregivers in 10 European countries will participate in an exchange of electronic patients’ records (EPRs) in the world's largest, first-ever cross-border connection of e-health systems. Brussels refers to this as a ‘large-scale e-health implementation’, and while it is easy to laugh about the bureaucratic language, it was the careful, go-slow approach of…
A telemedicine network project currently being implemented in the Leipzig region has won Australian IT firm iSOFT the top award in the 5th Ideenpark Gesundheitswirtschaft (Idea-park Healthcare) competition, presented by the Financial Times Deutschland at its annual FTD-Health Conference in Berlin. The awards are given for projects that contribute to greater transparency, productivity and…
Seven hospitals in the Tyrol region are now online with an IHE cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS) network centred at Insnsburch University Hospital. About 4,000 patient discharge letters are exchanged daily and 4,000 queries managed.
A 4.4.5 version of the Aquarius iNtuition advanced visualisation server-based software suite, including support for the newly-released iPad, was launched in April by TeraRecon.
After years of promise, with no progress, e-health is gaining ground in Europe, where governments see the potential for cost reductions and productivity gains in telemedicine, regarding it as a magic formula to fix overstretched healthcare systems, and the European Commission (EC) is aggressively pushing tele-anything in healthcare to drive what it sees as a potential for job creation and…
The volcanic ash creating widespread no-fly zones had no significant impact on the success of conhIT, Germany’s largest healthcare IT event; for three days in April some 3,500 experts were there to discuss current trends in their field and visit the IT trade fair to assess new solutions and products. One topic central to this year’s event was the convergence of IT and medical technology,…