March 2002
INTRODUCTION
The term "eHealth" is being heard all across Europe as country after country starts to develop an eHealth strategy.
This is partly the result of a natural maturation of thinking by government healthcare decision makers and also because the technologies to support eHealth are now widely affordable.
Previously acknowledged barriers, such as the legal and regulatory environment and the lack of cross-border remuneration flows are at least being addressed, if not yet solved and perhaps most importantly, the medical and other healthcare professionals are at last beginning to come behind this rapidly developing field.
The European Commissioner for Health and Customer Protection, David Byrne, is firmly behind eHealth to be used as a "power-tool" to create a Pan European perspective in terms of healthcare delivery. Not only would such a strategy, once delivered, reduce costly duplication of resources within European member states, but would accelerate the re-addressing of the current disparities in healthcare provision between candidate countries and current European member states.
Already we are seeing NHS patients crossing the channel for non-urgent surgical operations and even German doctors are planning to come to operate in the UK to reduce waiting lists.
All of this activity makes the role of the UK eHealth Association all the more important in defining as well as driving eHealth strategies in the UK. The Board has decided to commission the writing of an eHealth strategy for England to be delivered to the DoH later this year.
As Chairman of the eHealth Working Group of the European Health Telematics Association (EHTEL) an EC funded body - I was recently asked to submit a Position Paper on eHealth for Europe to the Commissioner of Health and this has been submitted and is now in discussion phase.
In March, I was elected to the Board of EHTEL and I will thus be able to keep you close by appraised of eHealth developments throughout Europe. These activities will open massive market opportunities for eHealth solutions, services and technologies and this bodes well for the continued growth of the UKeHA.
Our annual conference is not far away and I look forward to seeing you all in Cardiff in June.
Dr Ricky J Richardson FRCP FRCPCH, Chairman
Medibureau Ltd
The next members meeting will take place on 24 April 2002 at St George'sPostgraduate Medical Centre, London. If you would like to attend please confirm your attendance with monica@denwales.freeserve.co.uk
The NHS Executive West Midlands Region is making funding available to equip the 999 vehicles of the five ambulance services in the region with Mobimed (manufactured by Ortivus) as part of the national programme to reduce the time between a patient’s call for help and the beginning of treatment. The West Midlands initiative is the largest single programme to date and installation is due to begin early in 2002. www.ortivus.com
Tunstall is pleased to report that Rhondda Cynon Taff
County Borough Council will be the first organisation in Wales, and Hanover
Careline the first in Scotland, to offer Community Telemedicine monitoring
services. Both organisations have entered in to a partnership with Tunstall
to provide
services for local acute trusts whose main aim is to prevent admission and
facilitate the early discharge of respiratory patients through vital signs
monitoring at home. For further details about Community Telemedicine contact:
Julie Ryan,Tel: 01977 661234.
TeleMedic Systems’ VitalLink 1200 was submitted for the Innovation in Ship’s Communication Award. The judges were of the opinion that VitalLink 1200 was a welcome technology to the seafarer and was showing signs of transforming the maritime industry. VitalLink 1200 has been successfully tested with the new Inmarsat Fleet 77 system using the MPDS service. The Inmarsat Fleet terminals will provide the next generation in Mobile Wireless Communications for Maritime services. As well as Voice and Fax capabilities it will be capable of providing a choice of data services in the form of Mobile ISDN at 64k/bits/s and Mobile Packet Data capability. Using VitalLink 1200 with the Inmarsat Fleet 77, passengers and crew will receive medical advice where ever they may be at sea. For further information contact TeleMedic Systems +44 (0) 20 8874 211http://www.telemedicsystems.com
Millennium Systems is to provide Telemedicine and Telecare Tele-Referral Systems for the Welsh National Health Service (NHS) - the first project of its type within the NHS. The system will be installed in NHS organisations throughout the region to provide a range of services including direct patient care. The multimedia capability of the Tele-Referral technology enables the provision of care earlier and also share information obtained from other sources such as patient notes, x-rays from Picture Archiving and Communication Systems and management of notes from desktop applications. Millennium have a range of telemedicine modules available to meet the demands of a variety of medical Specialities including Dermatology, Minor Injuries with X-Ray scanning, ECG, Endoscopy Reporting, Paediatric / Child Protection and Video Conferencing. For further rinformation: tel : 01773 882552 or e-mail: info@millennium-systems.com
Wirral Hospital NHS Trust won the top prize in this year's Healthcare IT Effectiveness Awards for its introduction of an automated dispensing machine that saves staff time and reduces drug-dispensing errors. The Wirral Hospital team have developed new ways of working to enable staff time to be used more efficiently; improve the turnaround of prescriptions; and most importantly reduced dispensing errors. www.healthcare-computing.co.uk
Fingerprint scanning is currently being piloted as a practical and easy way of accessing the Open Exeter system, which uses web technology on the NHS network, to give healthcare professionals access to the patient data held by health authorities. The pilots at Lancashire with South Cumbria Health Authority and Bradford Health Authority each give 50 NHS staff access to Open Exeter. The main users are out of hours GP servcies which use the service to check such things as the patients GP and address details. The pilots are being funded by the Open Exeter Project Board. Source bjhc&im February 2002
A new online resource to answer health care professionals' frequently asked questions about diabetes is now live on the National Electronic Library for Health. With over 1.3 million people currently diagnosed with diabetes, and its prevalence increasing, the new Virtual Branch Library (VBL) is a timely knowledge resource for NHS staff, which will also help them meet National Service Framework standards. The new Diabetes VBL provides links to online evidence, literature and complementary web resources as well as information on detection, prevention, education and therapies. www.nelh.nhs.uk
A national email service designed to meet the needs of the NHS will be launched in the summer. It is aimed at giving all NHS staff a personal mailbox with direct access to email from the workplace or from other locations, including home. The national web-based email, which will run across the NHS network and the Internet, via a secure connection, will also give NHS staff a host of desktop services such as an online calendar, message boards, polls, chat forums, group storage, search engines and shared bookmarks. www.nhsia.nhs.uk
Portsmouth Hospital Trust is piloting a new email audit programme. The organisations captured email is run through its secure mail product. All types of email files and their attachments are scanned and checked for viruses, encrypted messages, key words, sender and recipient details, size and frequency, and then a final report is produced. Email audit takes a snapshot of the entire movement of mail in and out over a two week period before producing a report which can then be used to refine security policies and mitigate exposure to possible threats. Source: bjhc&im February 2002.
An information strategy for older people has been launched to support the National Service Framework (NSF) for Older People. The strategy identifies that health and social care systems for older people need to be integrated. www.doh.gov.uk/ipu/strategy/nsf/4.htm.
To enable the sharing of patients’ healthcare details nationally the NHS Information Authority has started a new programme of work called the Health Records Infrastructure (HRI).This new programme will provide new services based on web technology. It will link together existing computer systems, holding patient information. Details will be retrieved to form a virtual record of the NHS care and treatment each patient receives. Information will continue to be stored on many different computers, in disparate locations, but will be available to patients’ and NHS staff when and where it is needed. The new service will integrate locally held data and keep the amount of information held nationally on central databases to a minimum. www.nhsia.nhs.uk
The National Audit Office has reported that NHS Direct has achieved a high level of customer satisfaction since its introduction. The service, which has been fully available throughout England and Wales since November 2000, has a good safety record. Evidence at the local level suggests that it can help reduce demand on healthcare services provided outside normal working hours, for example by GPs, and is directing callers to more appropriate forms of care during the day www.nao.gov.uk
Peter Range (formerly Motion Media Technology) is now working as an independent e-health and tele-home-care consultant: Tel: 01454 315 066 Fax: 01454 322 392, rangepe@aol.com
Following an announcement made by the Canadian Minister of Health, the Government of Canada will contribute $900.000 to the primary care telemedicine and distance nursing network in Abitibi-Témiscamingue. The Centre de Santé Sainte-Famille, a family health centre in the rural West Québec region of Abitibi-Témiscamingue is leading a teleHealth project which will bring primary medical services to four isolated sites, including an Aboriginal community. Source: VMW March 2002
Researchers from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton Vaare are working on the on development of a non-invasive easy-to-use fetal heart monitor. The portable technology is being developed in response to a request from a physician whose practice is in a remote area where health care is difficult to obtain. http://www.federaltelemedicine.com/n031202.htm
Cardiac surgeons at East Carolina University are reporting encouraging research data on the largest number of patients who have had mitral valve repair using the robotic da Vinci Surgical System. The findings, showing decreased length of hospitalisation compared to the traditional approach and decreased surgical repair time, as experience using the robotic device grew, were presented recently at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons in Fort Lauderdale Source VMW March 2002
Doctors in Egypt have performed a variety of advanced paediatric laparoscopic procedures and adult general surgery cases with the Zeus Robotic Surgical System. Kasr El Aini Hospital is the first institution in the Middle East and Africa to successfully perform robotic surgery. Source: VMW March 2002
*Denotes the first appearance of the date of conferences and meetings
2002 UK Conferences
*ITCAT 2002: International Conference on Assistive Technology 24-25 April 2002. Pride Park Stadium, Derby Tel: 01245 242950 disability.grp@bcs.ork.uk
*Electronic Prescribing & Medicines Administration 8 May 2002, Hilton Birmingham Metropole Hotel Tel: 01932 821723 events@bjhcltd.demon.co.uk
*eBNF Conference and Exhibition – Prescribing Excellence 2002. 23 May 2002, Commonwealth Institute, London. Tel: 020 7383 6806 maggie.smith@bma.org.uk
*From Innovation to Implementation and Sustainability. A joint meeting between the Telemedicine & eHealth Forum of the Royal Society of Medicine and the NHS Executive. Wednesday 29 May 2002, Royal Society of Medicine, London
Partnerships in Healthcare:Telemedicine Forum . Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre 30 May 2002.For further information visit: http://www.partnershipsinhealthcare.co.uk/telemedicine/
UKeHA Annual Conference: Delivering Care Earlier 11-13 June 2002, Cardiff City Hall, Wales, UK: monica@denwales.freeserve.co.uk
e-Health 2002. The International e-Health Associations 2nd Annual Conference, 18-20 September 2002 London. Ehealth2002@cs.com www.eHealth2002.org
Healthcare Meets Medical Informatics and Innovation: The Future is Here 20-22 October 2002. Edinburgh International Conference www.hemmii.com
*Reshaping Clinical practices and Procedures with Information Flows: The Autumn Forum. 7 November 2002, The Royal College of Surgeons, London. www.bjhc.co.uk
2002 Overseas Conferences
Telemedicine & Telecare International Trade Fair April 10-12, 2002. www.telemedicine.lu or email: info@telemedicine.lu
Mobile-Health Europe MECC, 14-16 April 2002. Maastricht, the Netherlands PaulCAEHR@cs.com www.e-health-europe.com
New Models of Patient Care and Information, 18th-20th April 2002 Barcelona ers.info@ersnet.org
TEPR 2002 Proving the Electronic Healthcare Advantage. 11-16 May 2002 Washington State Convention Center, Seattle WA www.medrecinst.com
ATA 7th Annual Meeting 2-5 June 2002 LA Convention Center, Los Angeles, California. www.atmeda.org/news/newres.htm
Telemedicine in Care Delivery: Technology and Application 13-15 June 2002 Pisa, Italy : http://www.ticd.iss.it
*MIE 2002: The xviith International Conferenceof the European Federation for Medical informatics. 25-29 August 2002. Budapest, Hungary. www.conftours.mtesz.hu/mie2002
EuroPACS2002. 5-7 September 2002 at the Medical Faculty, University of Oulu, Finland. www.mirg.oulu.fi/europacs/general.html
7th International Conference on Telemedicine 22-25 September 2002, Regensburg, Germany http://www.ict2002.org
*5th European Health Forum 25-28 September 2002 Bad Hofgastein, Salzburg, Austria http://www.ehfg.org/website02/
4th Nordic Congress in Telemedicine/Nordsk Telemed 2002 30 September – 2 October 2002. University Hospital of Tromso, Norway Torill Berg, Tel: +47 77 754160 or email: torill.berg@telemed.no
Programme and information regarding the RSM meeting “From Innovation to Implementation and Sustainability”. A joint meeting between the Telemedicine & eHealth Forum of the Royal Society of Medicine and the NHS Executive. Wednesday 29 May 2002, Royal Society of Medicine, London
Request for IM&T / EPR Management Consultancy services. Terry Dennis, Healthcare Alliances: tdennis@healthcarealliances.co.uk
Please forward this e-mail to other colleagues who may find it of interest.
Monica Dennis
Administrator
UK eHealth Association
Britannia House, 11 High Street, Cowbridge
Vale of Glamorgan CF71 7AD
Tel and fax: 01446 775189
Mobile: 07811 159800
Email: mdennis@ukeha.org.uk
www.ukeha.org.uk