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News: Newsletter 25

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April 5, 2004

In this newsletter:

  • Responding to demographic and consumer pressures
  • PACS and EMR: industry landscapes and the shape of future technologies
  • InFace: producing advanced visual interfaces for timely retrieval of patient related information
  • Litmed2 project partners showcase clinical IT solutions at Med-e-Tel
  • Professor provides doctors' surgeries and hospitals with telemedicine software
  • Aquatics: a collaborative system for aortic aneurysm vascular surgery planning
  • ITACA: rich electronic patient record
  • News from the Med-e-Tel media partners
  • Newsbriefs
  • Conferences


Increased life expectancy and lower birth rates have changed the balance between working (young) and retired (old) people. As the average age of the population increases, more and more elderly people are expected to survive for significant periods (tens of years) with medical conditions that require multiple medication and healthcare interventions.
Latest population forecasts indicate that numbers of retired people and chronically sick will exceed the European working population by 2020. Apart from the potential cost of dealing with increased demand for healthcare services, there is an even more serious problem in terms of lack of people (at whatever cost) to deliver services in the way to which we have become accustomed. This problem will manifest itself not only in failure to meet demand, but also in growing dissatisfaction with the quality and effectiveness of services delivered.
With more widespread adoption of classic consumer attitudes towards healthcare delivery, there has been a rapid growth in medical litigation. Given the alarming increase in incidence of adverse medical incidents (already resulting in death on a scale approaching that attributable to motor accidents), the rise in litigation levels is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the failure to make better use of IT to mitigate the risks of adverse incidents.
Other industries would be neither prepared nor allowed to accept this level of malfunction in critical and potentially life threatening circumstances. Industries such as air travel, motor manufacture and food distribution have had to learn how to cope with management of quality and risk to acceptable and sustainable levels in the face of rapidly growing mass markets. Healthcare must inevitably follow this trend.
These and other topics will form the basis of a plenary session during Med-e-Tel entitled "Tracking eHealth Evolution in Europe", presented in cooperation with HINE (Health Information Network Europe). See www.medetel.lu for more information.


Med-e-Tel will feature a session in which industry analysts and experts will address the latest research findings, developments and trends in the PACS market and in the field of Electronic Medical Records (EMR). The session taking place on Friday April 23, 2004 from 10:00 AM includes a presentation by Frost & Sullivan analyst Antonio Garcia who will discuss several issues and dynamics that are shaping the current generation of enterprise image and data management strategies that are aimed at consolidating medical data management from front to back. A discussion of the major competitors, technology offerings, and implementation case studies will be provided, with special emphasis on challenges to optimizing the implementation of the electronic patient record (EPR).
In another presentation, Siddarth Saha, also from Frost & Sullivan, will take a look at challenges facing the medical industry in Europe, notably the need to have continental if not global standards in technology, terminology and electronic communications. The presentation takes a close look at how the EMR has developed in Europe, in some regions from a laboratory information systems lineage and in others from an imaging information management systems parentage, while in some major markets as a development from primary systems to enterprise wide records.
Furthermore the session also includes presentations about the opportunities of remote central archiving, the distribution of medical images without geographical boundaries, and finally a presentation on the "How" of optimal availability and reliability of patient health records. The session will also include an interactive Q&A with the audience. For more details, go to www.medetel.lu.


The InFace project is part funded under the 5th Framework program of the European Commission within the Information Society Technologies (IST) Program.
The InFace web based system aims to contribute towards the creation of a health-knowledge infostructure that will facilitate the retrieval of information in alignment to the needs and the personal characteristics of the health professionals, the institutions and the citizens.
InFace will provide health professionals with a user friendly web-based environment for accessing, retrieving and visualize in an easy to understand manner patients related information - within the domain of breast cancer - being stored into a wide variety of distributed, usually heterogeneous multimedia resources and databases. Health professionals will also be offered ubiquitous, timely and secure access to medical data at the point of care and through a variety of communication means and network infrastructures improving as a result their mobility in their everyday working life.
The general benefit of the InFace system will be the dissemination of medical information and most importantly medical knowledge, among professionals at the point of care. This in turn will greatly contribute towards the improvement of the decision making process of health professionals, and as a result improvement of their services to patients.
InFace will be presented in the Med-e-Tel exhibition and a presentation is also scheduled in the Med-e-Tel Conference parallel sessions. More details are at www.medetel.lu.


TietoEnator offers services and products for building new IT solutions within the public sector areas of government, healthcare, welfare and education. The main customer groups are governments, local authorities and providers of healthcare services. TietoEnator offers a complete service portfolio for digital government solutions as well as solutions for healthcare, social welfare, education and libraries. TE Trigon AB is now a part of TietoEnator Public & Healthcare AB and performs strategic consulting for TE customers. We are several persons working actively with eHealth strategies and telemedicine program implementations.
InformationsLogik is a company group specialised in the development and implementation of information systems for hospitals and especially clinical laboratories. Our offices are located in Malmö in Sweden and Utrecht in the Netherlands with a customer base in six European countries. We have a long tradition in Scandinavia where our system for pathology laboratories, iLab SymPathy, is the market leader. Since last year InformationsLogik Netherlands also has taken over all software development for most of the Dutch pathology laboratories. Our consultant service and products for hospital laboratories are demanded in a constantly growing international market.
Our concept iLab, Information system for Laboratories, is a totally new generation of development based on three-level solution with client/server-, multi-tier- and web technology.
Euromed Networks AB is a Swedish telemedicine and Image Management company which is well known for its unique and clinical approved systems. Our software for Image Management and Speech are well integrated and running with EPR systems. We can provide you with products like Picsara, Migra, MedSpeech, Click to Meet, VoiceJournal and Medipas.
More information about Litmed and the project partners will be provided in the Med-e-Tel exhibition and also presentations are scheduled for the conference program parallel sessions. See www.medetel.lu for more details.


With the distribution of freely available software, Prof. Christoph Meinel of the Institute for Telematics at the University of Trier (Germany) is trying to support the use of telemedicine in smaller hospitals and private practices and make the use, analysis and fast and secure exchange of digital medical images over the Internet easily possible for them as well. "We need a breakthrough in telemedicine", according to Prof. Meinel, who compares the telematic infrastructure in German healthcare to a "stained carpet of pilot projects".
"All standard PC's are suitable for the use of this software, which is operation system independent and which works according to the open and internationally recognized DICOM standard," says Meinel's colleague Michail Gevantmakher. Prof. Meinel sees the benefits of data and image exchange over computer networks mainly in the improved diagnostic quality and the shortened therapeutic reaction time.
The software is called jPACS and stands for Java Picture Archiving and Communication System. It is available at www.dicom.telematik-institut.org. A presentation about the system is also scheduled during Med-e-Tel in Luxembourg on Thursday April 22, 2004.


The aim of the AQUATICS project is to introduce a novel web service application dedicated to the planning of the endovascular treatment of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA). An emerging surgical technique for AAA repair is endovascular surgery, a procedure which requires a careful planning and an accurate measurement of the aortic anatomy. AQUATICS uses web technology standards to assemble patient specific models of AAA: in this way, doctors can use standard web browsers, with the appropriate standard plug-ins, to navigate in these models. The proposed system constitutes a significant qualitative improvement with respect to the currently available technology. The main expected result of the trial will be to show that it is possible for clinical institutions to delegate sophisticated IT tasks, such as medical imaging processing, to a specialized network distributed service-based on lightweight middleware and that this is feasible both from a clinical, and an economic point of view .
AQUATICS will be present at the stand of the European Cluster of projects EUTIST-M (stand 1C-91). With their participation at Med-e-Tel in Luxembourg in April 2004, the AQUATICS project partners intend to show their product and to look for new partners, interested in the commercialisation of the tool. More information can be obtained from http://www.medicaltech.org/aquatics and http://aquatics.crs4.it/PUBLIC/.


ITACA is a rich EPR (Electronic Patient Record), containing all the clinical information originated from hospitals diagnostic systems (laboratory, radiology, pathology, etc.) and from patient interaction with healthcare professionals (physicians, nurses etc). ITACA was developed by Dianoema Group and "S. Orsola" University Hospital of Bologna, Italy using Dianoema Group's clinical data management platform e-health.solutions®. ITACA and e-health.solutions® are currently used by many other Italian and German hospitals.
Some of the proved benefits of ITACA are:
- Increasing treatment effectiveness and quality of care by allowing interdisciplinary medical collaboration and ensuring the distribution of complete clinical information when and where needed (wards, districts, general practitioners).
- Providing immediate availability of all clinical information about a patient as soon as results are produced in diagnostic structures.
- Reducing the lead-time between request of examination and availability of result (laboratory referrals, radiology images...).
- Avoiding troublesome displacements. In most cases patients are obliged to get personally their examinations results at the hospital and bring them to the General Practitioners. With ITACA all patient data is available on-line directly on the GP PC.
At Med-e-Tel (Luxembourg, April 21-23, 2004) ITACA will be present at the stand of the European Cluster of projects EUTIST-M (stand 1C-91) and will also host a presentation in the Med-e-Tel conference program. More information can be obtained from http://www.itacaproject.org/.


For information on publications, journals, magazines and on-line information services that will help you to stay abreast of what is going on in the field of ehealth and to make better informed decisions in your daily business or healthcare practice, check out the list of Media Partners on www.medetel.lu. To follow is a review of just some of the publications that will be featured at the Med-e-Tel Media Corner during Med-e-Tel 2004 (April 21-23, 2004):

  • Published by Business Briefings Ltd. for the membership of the World Medical Association, Advanced Medical Technology is a comprehensive report focusing on the healthcare innovations in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases and new medical technologies. Written by leading industry clinical thought leaders and prominent scientists, Business Briefing: Advanced Medical Technologies is designed to provide a useful and informative tool for WMA members and senior professionals within the healthcare sector. Please contact for further information about the project or visit www.bbriefings.com for our Healthcare & Pharma Portfolio.
  • Radcliffe Medical Press publishes high quality books and journals in all aspects of the healthcare sector including those interested in the technology sector. The journal Informatics in Primary Care aims to provide information, help and guidance to all those concerned with information technology and information management in primary care, both nationally and internationally. Informatics is a new and exciting discipline, cutting across medicine, nursing, computing, technology, communications, education, statistics, psychology and sociology, but its primary purpose is the application of information and communications technology to support health care. The journals seeks high-quality material for both researchers and practitioners in the field of primary care informatics, ranging from scientific research papers, through editorials and case studies, to websites, useful tools, reviews and conferences. More info at www.radcliffe-oxford.com.
  • He@lth Information on the Internet (a Royal Society of Medicine Press publication) is a bimonthly newsletter to meet the growing demand from health professionals for information about health resources available on the internet . For further information on He@lth Information on the Internet, to browse the free archive (from Issue No. 1, published in February 1998, to Issue No. 20, published in April 2001) or to download a free sample issue, go to www.rsm.ac.uk/pub/hii.htm.
  • The Royal Society of Medicine Press will also be providing information in the Med-e-Tel Media Corner (April 21-23, 2004) about the Teledermatology Guide, Introduction to Telemedicine book and the highly regarded journal in this field: Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare. To browse the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare table of contents back to 1996 or to download a free sample issue, go to www.rsm.ac.uk/pub/jtt.htm.


To follow are links to some interesting and recently published articles and studies (if you would like to suggest an article for inclusion into a following newsletter, feel free to send details to ):
- Study demonstrates wireless voice communication positively impacts hospital communications, work flow, and caregiver satisfaction (Virtual Medical Worlds)
- Doc@Hand aims to deliver knowledge sharing and decision support for health care professionals (Virtual Medical Worlds)
- Evaluation of Bluetooth as a Replacement for Cables in Intensive Care and Surgery (Anesthesia & Analgesia)
- Overcoming Structural Constraints to Patient Utilization of Electronic Medical Records: A Critical Review and Proposal for an Evaluation Framework (Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association)
- Wireless To The Rescue (InformationWeek)
- Telehealth Demonstration Launched to Improve Cancer Research and Care (NCI Cancer Bulletin)
- British Journal Explores Future of Telemedicine (ATSP)
- Progress Report on the HOMED-BP Study: Hypertension Objective Treatment Based on Measurement by Electrical Devices of Blood Pressure Study (Clinical and Experimental Hypertension)
- Commerce Report Urges Federal Funding for Telemedicine (Health-IT World)
- XML-based patient records: The next big wave (Advance for Health Information Professionals)
- The I.T. of Tomorrow: Is it Here Today? (Health Data Management)
- DICOM influence spreads beyond imaging to medical records (Diagnostic Imaging)
- Software pulls images based on visual characteristics (Diagnostic Imaging)
- Canadian Pilot Project Demonstrates Video-Based Home Telehealth (ATSP)
- Interview with Dr. Soncul, United Kingdom Telepsychiatrist (ATSP)
- West Australia Plans Health Network (ATSP)
- E-Health Comes Calling: On the trip to disease management, quality made the plans, but cost does the driving (Healthcare Informatics)


- An ATSP TeleUpdates on "TeleHospice" will take place on Wednesday April 29, 2004. End of life care service needs vary enormously according to patients’ circumstances; and meeting these needs using conventional care services can be trying. Telehealth tools and services offer hospice providers new options in delivering care to their patients. There is a growing range of telecommunications-ready tools that can help to ameliorate some difficult situations at end of life. These tools range in complexity from the telephone to full-scale telehealth workstations and advanced electronic devices. However, few telehealthcare tools are designed specifically for end of life patient needs. This 2 and a half hour teleconference will help providers identify and match the appropriate telehealth tools to meet the unique needs of hospice patients. For more information visit www.telehealthconference.org.

 
 

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