On 7 November, the second edition of the ICT Integration of Levels of Assistance meeting was held in order to present experiences in sharing knowledge and the development of management tools for collaboration between professionals. These are experiences that have been produced thanks to the initiative of specific professionals and institutions, but which can be copied and adapted to the different realities. Within the framework of the performance of the Health Plan 2011-2015, the Directorate General for Regulation, Planning and Health Resources organised this meeting in collaboration with the Fundació TicSalut.

The Government this October approved the Strategic Plan of Research and Innovation in Health 2012-2015, which has the purpose of improving health and economic growth in Catalonia by means of new policies in this area. Pushed forward by the Directorate General of Regulation, Planning and Health Resources, this strategic plan is mainly intended to shorten the time between the results of research and their application in clinical practice and public health. Furthermore, the plan will encourage innovation and the culture of transfer between researchers and healthcare professionals in order to optimise the resources available.

Medical results improve if the patients use eHealth applications that allow the empowerment and expansion of knowledge on the illness they suffer. This is the conclusion of an empirical study performed by the University of Lugano (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland) based on a Web application for people affected by fibromyalgia. The researchers suggested to the developers and professionals of the eHealth area that they direct their efforts to achieving greater patient health awareness. However, according to the study, the presence of interactive functions is not a determining factor in the effectiveness of this kind of application.

The Fundació TicSalut has made a firm investment in the model of open innovation by starting up CloudInnTicSalut (http://ticsalut.innogetcloud.com), a virtual platform that opens doors to exporting ICT and Health technological solutions produced in Catalonia. This new cloud internationalisation tool is made available to all Catalan institutions and companies in the sector to enable them to connect with their technological partners, to share knowledge and resources and to give their business technological demands. CloudInnTicSalut works thanks to Innoget, a marketplace (virtual meeting point) of open innovation with more than 19,000 users registered around the world.

With more than 4,300 subscribers, the FlashTicSalut monthly electronic bulletin has now reached its 50th edition in good shape, consolidated as a benchmark for the community of professionals interested in Information and Communication Technologies in the area of health. Readers receiving the publication believe that this initiative by the Fundació TicSalut is a good source of information on technology, innovation and health. Furthermore, the consulted professionals agree that cloud computing, mobile applications and other ICT devices will contribute to improving citizens’ health and the quality of healthcare in Catalonia.

Since the first edition of FlashTicSalut, the latest tendencies have been dealt within the area of ICT innovation in the health sector. Twelve outstanding representatives of the sector, including the government of Catalonia Health Minister, Boi Ruiz, have given their opinion on the emerging opportunities in the 50th edition of this bulletin. As well as accepting the challenge of analysing twelve questions regarding the future, the consulted experts gave a brief assessment limited to just 140 characters of the development of the FlashTicSalut bulletin.

“We are not only connected to others via Facebook or Internet, in fact we are literally connected via our neurons”. Vilayanur Ramachandran, neuroscientist and director of the University of California Center for Brain and Cognition, explains the functions of the “mirror neurons”, which have allowed us to learn complex social behaviours. This video, taking advantage of the fact that 2012 is the Year of Neuroscience, is one of the more than 900 free access talks you will find on the website of the TED (www.ted.com), a non profit-making organisation working to spread worthwhile ideas around the world.

The work done in Catalonia to define a new standard for digitalising forced spirometry tests has been received as the base of the new European standard. This recognition has come from the European technical committee of the International Standardisation Organisation (ISO), which works in the European Union to standardise the field of Medical and Communications Technology Information. The aim of the ISO is to achieve compatibility and interoperability among independent systems and to enable modularity in electronic medical records.

The Fundació TicSalut, along with the Health Quality, Assessment and Information Agency (Agència d’Informació, Avaluació i Qualitat en Salut - AIAQS) and the Government of Catalonia Health Department Office of International Relations and Cooperation will this year be taking part in the annual meeting of the WHO-FIC Network (World Health Organisation Family of International Classifications Network). This meeting will be held in Brasilia (Brazil) from 13 to 19 October. At the present time, the Fundació TicSalut is also in the process of being made a WHO Disease Classification Collaborating Centre, following the application made in 2010 by Joan Cornet, the CEO of the foundation.

Intensive daily control of glucose in the blood by those who suffer from diabetes is basic in avoiding complications in their health. Despite this, it has been scientifically shown that the teenage population in the world is not therapeutically adhered to self-monitoring apparatuses, despite the young people’s willingness to use the technology. Starting from this premise, the researchers of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation and of the University Health Network of Toronto (Canada) have shown that by combining the use of an mHealth app with gamification as an incentive, a substantial increase is achieved in the frequency with which adolescents with type 1 diabetes carry out a control.

Digitalisation of radiological and non-radiological medical imagery in Catalonia has grown substantially in the last three years. According to the ICT Survey of the Map of Tendencies 2011, a Fundació TicSalut initiative, from the 58% of radiological studies stored in PACS in 2008, today 100% are saved. Specifically, 94% of the institutions of SISCAT, the Integrated Health System of the Network of Public Use of Catalonia, assure that they no longer print out x-rays. This tendency is motivated by the Medical Imagery Digitalisation Plan, driven by the Catalan Health Department and by the investments of the institutions in the digitalisation process.

Three days exchanging experiences around the growing sector of eHealth. This was the line of the sixth edition of the "Université d'Été de la e- Santé" held in Castres-Mazemet (France) on 4, 5 and 6 July. This European event organised by the Technopole – Castres-Mazamet European Centre of Enterprise and Innovation, the Centre e-Santé in Toulouse and the La Mêlée Association received the support of the Fundació TicSalut. In this unbeatable context, the agreements reached at the third ICT and Health R&D+i Meetings in June in Girona were reaffirmed, in which the cross- border relations of the Pyrenees-Mediterranean Euroregion were stressed.

The health systems no longer meet the needs of the population in Europe. They are complex organisations, difficult to manage and highly fragmented and change is something difficult to achieve. "We know from experience in other sectors that the application of ICTs can revolutionise and improve healthcare in Europe", says Toomas Hendrik, president of Estonia and president of the European Union eHealth Task Force. This group of high- level advisers, including Dr. Joan Guanyabens, managing director of the Agència d’Informació, Avaluació i Qualitat en Salut (AIAQS - Agency of Information, Assessment and Quality in Health), has put forward a report with the levers of change and recommendations to reorganise the healthcare systems by developing ICTs.

In the coming course 2012-2013, two programs of the third university cycle will be started up in the Catalan faculties to promote innovation, enterprising and research into ICT applied to health, a new economic drive. On the one hand, the UPC is starting the Masters Degree in Smart Health Innovation, and the UB is activating the Masters Degree in Information and Communication Technologies in the Area of Health. Furthermore, the Gimbernat University School, attached to the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), will offer the second edition of the University Masters Degree in Management of Information and Knowledge in the Area of Health (MUGICAS). The three courses receive the support and participation of the Fundació TicSalut.

Making an ecosystem grow in mHealth (mHealth) is a real opportunity to offer better quality healthcare at a lower cost. The fundamental principle of ecosystems is simple: they enhance the participation of all health agents, and also those in the area of well-being and social healthcare in a specific geographic area. These stakeholders reach agreements with other collaborating partners to set up mHealth solutions and thereby face the challenges of assistance. The 4th European Connected Health Leadership Summit (ECHSummit 2012), organised by ECHAlliance in Barcelona on 23 May as a satellite event to the MIHealthForum, revealed the need to encourage an international network of permanent ecosystems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.