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Manufacturers of medical devices and apparatuses have managed
to rise, as a whole, as a strong sector after aiming their products
mainly at two segments of the population: consumers concerned with
a healthy lifestyle, and; patients that have to periodically
monitor their state of health as chronic or dependent sick. Between
these are the so-called information seekers, a potential market
unattended both by the consumer electronics companies and by those
specialised in medical equipment. Today's challenge for producers
is to gain terrain in the sector by offering these consumers new
gadgets.
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The largest annual European conference on eHealth, the eHealth
Week, will be taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 9 May coinciding
with the Danish presidency of the Council of the European Union.
This year's edition will stress the continuity of assistance and
how the health information flows between the hospital and the home.
Furthermore, the strengthening of the power of patients and the
opportunities for investing in information technologies in order to
manage chronic illness are other outstanding subjects of the
programmed talks, seminars and workshops. Politicians, health
managers and professionals of health and ICT from all around Europe
will meet at the eHealth Week.
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The UdG Science and Technology Park and the TicSalut
Foundation, in collaboration with UBI France, the French Chamber of
Commerce in Barcelona and the Mediterranean-Pyrenees Euro-region
are organising the third R&D+i Meeting in ICT and Health on 7
and 8 June in Gerona. This time the meeting will deal with the area
of well-being and quality of life, in addition to ICT and health.
This new edition of the Meeting is also expected to consolidate the
relations and to discover opportunities in the cross- border
region.
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The use of social media and communication in the network has
grown exponentially since the popularisation of the social network,
video, chat and forum platforms. In the area of health, more and
more nursing professionals are turning to 2.0 tools to use them
professionally, at least in the United States. Twitter, Slideshare,
YouTube and blogs allow nurses to exchange points of view,
knowledge and health to be promoted amongst the citizens. However,
it is necessary to know the limits to the use of the social
networks in order to maintain patients’ confidentiality and
privacy.
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“The Observatory is and must be a project aimed at
everyone, and we must make it grow and evolve”, insisted Joan
Guanyabens, managing director of the Agency of Information,
Assessment and Quality in Health (AIAQS), at the presentation of
the Observatory of Innovation in Healthcare Management in Catalonia
on the past 2 March at the Torre Agbar auditorium in Barcelona.
Thanks to the Agency, the Catalan Health Department has promoted
this instrument which brings together innovative healthcare
management experiences in Catalonia and other countries in a space
open to all organisations prepared to share their knowledge.
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It has never been more necessary to find different ways of
giving better healthcare than now. Growth and the ageing
population, along with an unfavourable economic situation require a
reconsideration of the present structure of the healthcare services
that is able to offer better healthcare without increasing the
budgets of the health centres and systems. MIHealth Management
& Clinical Innovation Forum is intended to reply to the sector
challenges by studying the latest national and international
tendencies and success cases.
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eHealth is the star component of the Australian Health Reform.
In 2008 the country’s Department of Health and Ageing
developed the National eHealth Strategy in which it identified the
potential applications of ICTs in healthcare. Three years later,
the most extensive country in Oceania in a report has checked its
doctors and healthcare professionals’ commitment to eHealth
and has concluded that today they are all capable of applying ICTs
in their practices. However, certain barriers remain and a road map
has to be established to spread eHealth throughout the Australian
health system.
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Mobile applications for improving health and well-being are a
tendency that has experienced exponential growth in the last year.
According to current forecasts, the sector is expected to develop
800% by 2013 and medical applications for mobile devices are
expected to be used by 500 million people around the world by 2015.
The main applications developers and international experts on the
subject will make an in-depth analysis of the tendency and will
explore the new healthcare opportunities in the talk “Apps ON
Health”, which will take place at the Hospital Sant Joan de
Déu on 19 March.
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Greater quality of life, more patient satisfaction and better
accessibility to the services, these are the main benefits that
teleassistance gives people suffering from chronic illnesses. This
was the comment made by professor Denis Protti, the founder of the
Victoria University School of Health Information Sciences (Canada)
in a talk organised by the Fundació TicSalut and the Agency of
Information, Evaluation and Quality in Health (Agència
d’Informació, Avaluació i Qualitat en Salut -
AIAQS) on the past 2 February in Barcelona. Protti stressed the
role played by ICTs in the integration between specialities and
assistance levels.
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Reducing waiting times, increasing efficiency in dealing with
chronic illnesses, improving access to medical assistance in rural
communities and avoiding adverse events. Although the ambitious
roadmap of the Canadian public health includes all of these points,
Canada Health Infoway, an independent corporation created by the
government, focuses its efforts on pushing forward the Electronic
Health Record (EHR) in the country and hopes to spread it to 100%
of citizens by 2015. The aim of planning to introduce ICTs into the
health care area replies to the need to develop strategies to
achieve a more efficient and secure system.
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The International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision.
Clinical Modification (ICD-9- CM) is the system required in
Catalonia for notifying the health administration of the activity
in all hospitals and other public health establishments. It is a
basic tool for coding diseases and interventions and enables the
basic data to be gathered in a standard way for achieving health
information. The government of the United States each year revises
the original version in English, and since 1991, the Health
Department has dealt with having it translated into Catalan and
encouraging its use amongst health professionals.
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For the first time patients around Europe can use eHealth
frontier services, which include those of Catalonia. The epSOS
(European Patients Smart Open Services) project allows states to be
able to offer standard health care to citizens travelling outside
the country as tourists, businessmen and women, students or for
work. The epSOS project is therefore intended to develop an ICT
infrastructure that gives patients secure access to their
information, and above all to their medical records and electronic
prescriptions, regardless of the European health care system that
is attending them.
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Up to now, primary assistance doctors asked specialists for
opinions on specific cases in informal meetings in hospital
corridors or even in the cafeteria. Many patients were therefore
sent on to a consultant in a manner that was not well coordinated,
sometimes unnecessarily and at a cost that could have been saved.
Electronic queries or eQueries, a new application of ICTs in the
health area, resolves these problems and improves the quality of
the reply. The North American Commonwealth Fund recently studied
the experience of the pioneers in eQuery.
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“We are facing a truly technological revolution that
places citizens at the centre of the health system”, says
Joan Cornet, Tic Salut Foundation CEO, in the article ‘New
scientific and technological paradigms’ (Nous paradigmes
científics i tecnològics) (R+D; TIC), in the last edition
of the ‘Referent’ journal of the Unió Catalana
d’Hospitals. The western world has consolidated highly
complex, efficient health systems that today face a problem of
sustainability. ICTs will undoubtedly be part of the solution if
five challenges are overcome: passing from information to
knowledge; guaranteeing the confidentiality of data; achieving
integrated systems; managing change in organisations; and assessing
the results.
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The Health Minister, Boi Ruiz, along with the Mayor of
Mataró, Joan Mora, presided the presentation of the Map of
Tendencies 2011 with regard to ICTs in health services in Catalonia
at an event held on the past 16 December. The Map of Tendencies is
a yearly publication produced by TicSalut Foundation since 2007 on
commission by the Health Ministry, which reveals the development of
ICTs in health organisations in Catalonia and makes a prospective
analysis of the national and international tendencies in this
area.
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The Fundació TicSalut and the Ministry of Health for the
Government of Catalonia took part in the WHO-FIC Network Meeting
recently held in Cape Town, South Africa. The meeting provided
participants with a workspace broken down into face-to-face
meetings for each of the reference groups and committees, in order
to define a standardised conceptual framework of consensus that
might favour communication between health governments, providers
and users.
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On the past 29 September, Barcelona hosted the first session
of discussions and conferences on The role of ICT in attending and
preventing chronic illness, organised by the Catalonia Technology
Circle Foundation, Barcelona Digital Technology Centre and
Fundació TicSalut. The forms of collaboration between the
public and private sectors, the possibility of including more
functions in the health card or presenting the Danish experience as
a success case were some of the most important points in a session
which was also widely followed in the social networks.
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On Tuesday 15 November ACC1Ó will be organising the
Meeting of Business Promotion Agencies in Barcelona, an event that
will last for three days and will combine seminars and interviews
with the directors and professionals of the ACC1Ó offices
around the world. The Fundació TicSalut will be taking part in
the opening meeting with the talk Germany and Switzerland: Business
opportunities in the medical technologies and e-Health
sector.
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On the coming 9 November, the Hospital de Sant Pau i de la
Santa Creu de Barcelona will be host to the III Workshop UK &
Catalunya: Technologies for health. This meeting, which is
organised by the Fundació TicSalut and which will combine
talks and specialised work sessions, is a unique place for eHealth
collaboration and knowledge transfer and consolidates the good
understanding between the healthcare sectors in the two
countries.
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The Canal Salut (Health Channel) provides citizens and
professionals with the full range of the Health Department’s
resources brought together coherently in a single multichannel
platform in order to improve and increase the services on offer.
The tool is intended to make citizens jointly responsible for their
health through education, information and participation, while
enhancing prevention and healthcare promotion at the same time. It
also improves professionals and institutions’ access to the
most import resources in accordance with the directives of the
steering plan.
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The New England Journal of Medicine has carried out a study on
the use of electronic health records, which has brought forth very
good results. The analysis works on updated data and considers
measurement criteria such as the economic capacity of the
healthcare systems that have implemented the resource and the use
of tools for improving quality in coordinating patient
attention.
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