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News: Newsletter 31

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February 23, 2005

In this newsletter:

  • Med-e-Tel announces highlights of its 2005 conference program
  • Register now to attend Med-e-Tel at reduced entrance fees
  • Make hotel reservations for Med-e-Tel on time
  • European 'ICT for Health' research: From managing health status to the increasing personalization of health diagnosis and treatment
  • DICTATe: Supporting healthcare professionals with a voice-mediated system for structured data entry
  • Reducing risk management by building knowledge driven and dynamically adaptive networked communities within European healthcare systems
  • Developing a semantic web services-based interoperability framework for the healthcare domain
  • Saving lives and improving medical response with DICOEMS
  • New EENA advisory committee to focus on the use of emergency communications and information management systems
  • News from ISfT
  • Med-e-Tel Matchmaker
  • News from the Med-e-Tel media partners
  • Newsbriefs


The Med-e-Tel 2005 conference program will bring together expert speakers from more than 25 countries delivering experience-based presentations and panel discussions on a variety of ehealth topics. The program includes a.o.:
- a TM-Alliance (ESA, WHO, ITU, EC) contribution on "Trans-National Interoperability in eHealth: Facing the Challenges and Overcoming the Barriers";
- a session on "European 'ICT for Health' Research: From Managing Health Status to the Increasing Personalization of Health Diagnosis and Treatment" with presentations by several EU co-funded ehealth projects and the ICT for Health Unit of the Directorate-General Information Society of the European Commission;
- a session on "Space-Based Technology Applications to eHealth" chaired by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and the Medical Informatics and Technology Applications Consortium (MITAC), a NASA Research Partnership;
- eHealth Standardization Coordination Group (ITU, WHO, ISO, CEN, IEEE, HL7, DICOM) session on "eHealth Standardization";
- a workshop on the "Use of Handheld Devices in Hospitals" hosted by the WardInHand project consortium;
- a workshop on "Ontology and Interoperability in Medical RTD Projects" chaired by the DICOEMS project consortium;
- sessions on "eHealth and Developing Countries" chaired by ITU and WHO;
- sessions on eHealth Home Care Applications, Effects and Benefits of eHealth, Distance Education, Decision Support Systems, eConsultation, Internet-Based Systems, Image Transfer and eHealth Ethics;
- a session on "National Experiences in Telemedicine and eHealth" hosted by the International Society for Telemedicine;
- a regional seminar co-organized by the Luxembourg CRP-Santé and the European Association of Hospital Managers about the informatization of hospital logistics and administration specifically aimed at hospital, industry, government representatives in Luxembourg, Belgium and France;
- confirmed speakers at the Opening Ceremony of the event include Prof. Dr. Jean-Claude Healy, Director of eHealth Strategy at WHO, Prof. Dr. Michael Nerlich, President of ISfT, and Mars Di Bartolomeo, Luxembourg Minister of Health and Social Security.
A general schedule is available here. Program details can be found here.
A preliminary list of exhibitors can be found here.
A list of supporting organizations and media partners is at here and here.


Register this week until 25 February here and take advantage of the early-bird registration fee. Registration includes access to the exhibition, conference programs and social events during the 3 days of the event.
Med-e-Tel, the international trade gathering and conference for ehealth, telemedicine and health ICT, with participants from more than 45 countries, is the perfect place to meet with suppliers of ehealth/telemedicine equipment and services, ask questions about the implementation of ehealth/telemedicine applications in your organization, spot future trends, attend high profile conferences and presentations, and make valuable contacts with colleagues from around the world.


If you need to make a hotel reservation for your stay in Luxembourg during Med-e-Tel, please click here and submit your reservation request. Hotel rooms are going fast so make sure to book your room well in advance.


The ICT for Health Unit of the Information Society Directorate-General of the European Commission will chair a conference session at this year's Med-e-Tel, presenting a series of European Commission co-financed ICT for health (eHealth) projects, all of which form part of the Information Society Technologies Thematic Priority of the Sixth Framework Programme.
One presentation will concentrate on the management of patients' health status, and the implicit risks involved in making critical medical and health decisions. The session covers the project DICOEMS.
A second set of projects, which begins with the project COCOON, will shift the scene from healthcare risk management to identifying how semantic web services and information retrieval methods can support such key concerns. ARTEMIS shows how the standards in the ontological field can support emerging technologies. Sophisticated medical databases help to increasingly individualise the healthcare and treatment offered to citizens and patients.
Through the projects BIOPATTERN and INFOBIOMED, speakers will explore how the personalisation of diagnosis and treatment can be enhanced through the converging fields of medical informatics and bio-informatics.
It is particularly in this new area of convergence that possibilities exist for future research and technological development. These ICT for health research initiatives can help forge a new information space for Europe, can help innovate and invest in forward-looking information and communication technologies, and will lead to a more inclusive and better quality of life for Europe's patients and citizens.
Attend this session, taking place on Wednesday afternoon 6 April, by registering for Med-e-Tel now here. More information about some of the projects can be found in some of the articles in this and upcoming editions of the Med-e-Tel newsletter.


The DICTATe project focuses on the capture of clinical narratives by supporting healthcare professionals with a voice-mediated system for a structured data entry. DICTATe provides medical professionals with an essential productivity tool, an unobtrusive input device that will help them to avoid the burden of writing and dictating endless patient records and awaiting the return of documents from a transcriber. It reduces time wastes by doctors and nurses, providing much shorter turnaround time and correspondingly increasing the amount of time they can devote to their primary goals. This way they will be able to generate more thoughtful and comprehensive notes for each patient, producing accurate records and improving patient care and quality of service.
DICTATe's primary goal is to elicit a maximum of information with a minimum of effort from the health professionals eliminating poor communications and poor distribution among actors involved. It aims at timeliness and extensiveness of information collection, closing the gap between the point where the information is collected and used (the patient bed) and the hospital medical record system.
The system comprises (1) a handheld device for data entry and communication with a centralized system; (2) a wireless communication system enabling secure, reliable, real-time transmission of data from the mobile device at the point of care, to the main system server and vice versa; and (3) a centralized system existing of a server application performing medical Natural Language Processing (NLP System and Knowledge Base) and communicating with both the mobile device and the hospital's clinical record-keeping system.
The handheld device offers speech and text input interfaces so that the end-user can operate the device either in a voice-based or in pen-based mode. Voice will be converted to text through an automatic speech recognition module. The DICTATe device will give the opportunity to the health professional to enter and sign data and retrieve previous examinations either by the HIS or by the patient's smart card and interact with the system in a natural way. In addition, the device will be providing medical guidelines to the health professional to support the diagnosis process.
Learn more about the system and meet DICTATe representatives throughout the 3-day Med-e-Tel exhibition.


Scientific knowledge, capability to face difficult clinical cases and making correct diagnoses are essential elements in today's European healthcare system. COCOON is an integrated project aimed at supporting health care professional in reducing risk management in their daily practices.
Risk management for a healthcare professional is completely related to his/her assumption of responsibilities in patient diagnosis and treatment processes. The growth of patient judgement autonomy, the level of available information, and the cost/benefit assessment of possible intervention actions are three important factors that force healthcare professionals to pay much more attention to provide the right answer to a patient's problem. The increase in the last 5 years of both juridical trials and the healthcare insurance costs for the healthcare professional, for coverage of medical error effects, are two important indicators of the relevance of the problem at European level. To prevent! these, healthcare professionals ha ve established various associations or informal communities that help them in sharing the risk and doing the right thing for the patient. None of them are really supported by IT solutions powered for enhancing the risk management process. COCOON wants to bridge that gap by supporting knowledge driven collaborative practices in networks of healthcare professionals in order to minimise medical errors in diagnosis and treatment.
COCOON project partners include research centers such as the School of Management of the Polytechnic of Milan, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Technion University of Tel Aviv, Cefriel of Polytechnic of Milan and Fondazione IARD, and companies such as Siemens Informatica who will develop the knowledge management system of the COCOON platform, Telecom Italia who will develop the communication system among general practitioners in order to gain access to the COCOON platform both with fixed and mobile devices, and Microsoft who will develop an interoperable system and commercialize the final COCOON product.
Meet COCOON representatives at Med-e-Tel and sit in on their presentation on Wednesday 6 April.


Most of the health information systems today are proprietary and often only serve one specific department within a healthcare institute. To complicate matters, a patient's health information may be spread out over a number of different institutes which do not interoperate. This makes it very difficult for clinicians to capture a complete clinical history of a patient.
On the other hand, web services models provide the healthcare industry with an ideal platform to achieve the difficult interoperability problems. Web services are designed to wrap and expose existing resources and provide interoperability among diverse applications.
The EC co-funded ehealth project ARTEMIS deals with these issues by:
- Developing the necessary infrastructure to provide interoperability of medical information systems through semantically enriched web services. For this purpose, generic web service ontologies will be defined to describe both the service functionality and service messages.
- Providing interoperability of electronic health records through web services. In the healthcare domain, there is more than one standard to represent the same information, which in turn creates an interoperability problem. ARTEMIS takes a different approach regarding the interoperability of medical information systems. It focuses on processes in terms of web services rather than recording and documentation of electronic health records. In other words, the approach allows a standard way of accessing the data rather than standardizing the documents. Then the interoperability problem among different healthcare standards will be handled at the semantic level through ontology mapping and semantic mediation.
- Providing an integration environment for disparate applications both within the healthcare domain and with the organizations they communicate with: healthcare is a many-to-many business. It is not only connecting a hospital to its branch clinics but to an array of internal and external agencies with disparate data sources and applications (healthcare organizations, insurance entities and government agencies).
Meet ARTEMIS representatives at Med-e-Tel and attend their presentation on Wednesday 6 April.


DICOEMS is an ehealth platform that acquires and transfers critical information from the place where a medical emergency occurs to remotely located health specialists for immediate assistance. The objective of DICOEMS is to save lives and improve the medical response by emergency ambulance services and the management of patients by a nation's emergency departments.
The system consists of a portable collaboration environment that brings together the on-the-spot care provider and a network of experts, thus enabling more effective decision support and risk management in primary diagnosis, pre-transfer arrangements and treatment of critical situations.
Advantages of the use of ICTs for ambulance staff and emergency departments/trauma experts, or in situations of natural disasters are:
- easy navigation to an incident site;
- allowing paramedics to follow procedures from hand held computers;
- allowing paramedics to record basic patient information and send it to emergency department;
- sending images of incident sites and the patient's condition to hospital trauma specialists and to central emergency switchboards
- sending patient vital signs (up to and including ECG) to emergency departments.
Meet DICOEMS representatives at the Med-e-Tel exhibition and join their presentation on Wednesday 6 April. DICOEMS will also host a workshop on "Ontology and Interoperability in Medical RTD Projects" on Friday 8 April.


EENA, the European Emergency Number Association, has announced the creation of a new advisory committee to help with the work of the EENA: the Scientific and Operational Advisory Committee (SOAC) made up of representatives of the public safety and emergency services as well as of representatives of final user organisations.
The objectives of the SOAC are to provide a user/member-led discussion platform for professional and final users in the field of emergency communications and information management systems in order to establish coordinated user requirements, quality of service standards, functional but technologically and politically neutral requirements, best practices guides, skills and recommendations in this field, with the purpose of enhancing the delivery of public safety services for the benefit of the citizens as well as public safety and emergency services. And also to foster and influence future developments and use of efficient, effective, economic, secure, reliable and interoperable emergency communications and information management systems for public safety and emergency services by means of planning, coordination, coordinated input, professional advice, education as well as information collection, exchange and dissemination.
The SOAC will maintain an effective relationship and cooperation with industry, standard setting bodies, national and EU authorities and organisations to ensure a better promotion and implementation of professional and final user requirements.
EENA has also created a Commercial Advisory Committee (CAC) made up of representatives of the industry whose role will be to provide a two-way source of communications between the user members and the commercial members of the association providing a source of expertise and support.
More info can be found at www.eena.org.


In this section of the Med-e-Tel newsletter, we report news from the ISfT (International Society for Telemedicine), supporting partner of the Med-e-Tel event.
- ISfT will host a special conference session at Med-e-Tel 2005 in Luxembourg entitled "National Experiences in Telemedicine and eHealth". The session is scheduled for Thursday 7 April between 10h00 and 12h30 and will feature presentations by ISfT members from UK, Brazil, El Salvador, South Africa, Finland and Poland. For details please check www.medetel.lu.
- ISfT is also holding a Board Meeting and General Assembly at Med-e-Tel on Wednesday 6 April. For invitation and agenda, please refer to www.isft.net.
- If you would like to meet with ISfT representatives at Med-e-Tel, please send an e-mail to to arrange an appointment.
- The 10th ISfT International Conference will take place in Sao Paulo, Brazil on 23-26 October 2005 in conjunction with the meeting of the Conselho Brasileiro de Telemedicina e Telesaude (www.cbtms.com.br/isft).
- For more information or to contact ISfT, see www.isft.net or send an e-mail to .


The Med-e-Tel matchmaker aims to facilitate contacts and links between various telemedicine and ehealth professionals and providers around the world. To obtain more details about the request(s) below or to provide your services, contact us at and we will put you in touch with the source of these requests. If you would like to submit a request of your own, and we will publish it in a next newsletter.
- Poland: health service provider looking for suppliers of telemedicine equipment, especially pulmonary diagnostic equipment for use in primary care.


For information on publications, journals, magazines, reports 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 2005 (April 6-8, 2005):

- IHE (International Hospital Equipment and Solutions), Med-e-Tel's main international media partner, will feature in its upcoming April issue a special focus on healthcare IT, telemedicine and risk management. To learn more about this month's specials as well as about the markets and areas served by IHE with its regular 27,000+ high quality BPA audited circulation, contact .

- IST Results is a free online news service (www.cordis.lu/ist/results) which provides up to date information on research developed by leading European companies, specialist SME's and their research partners. You can read more in the following article about the interoperability domain, one of the 28 technology and market application areas covered by IST Results: http://interop-noe.org/news/ISTresults. Click here for news on e-health. E-health will also be IST Result's editorial focus for March 2005.

- The Royal Society of Medicine Press is providing information in the Med-e-Tel Media Corner about the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, which is widely regarded as the leading journal in the field. Due to the continuing success of the journal, from 2005, the Journal will be published 8 times per year instead of 6, adding a new, US based co-editor, Liz Krupinski of Tucson University, and adding in several new content sections. To browse the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare table of contents back to 1996 or to download a free sample issue, go to www.rsmpress.co.uk/jtt.htm.

- Federal Telemedicine Update, published by Bloch Consulting Group, is an online publication that goes to healthcare professionals, corporate executives, college and university directors, academic medical centers, researchers, hospital administrators, and others in the field that need up to the minute data on telemedicine, telehealth, and health information technology activities in the U.S. Federal Government, Universities, and State governments. Two reports are published annually "Federal agencies: Activities in Telehealth, Telemedicine, and Informatics" and a companion report aquot;University and State Activities: Telemedicine, Telehealth, Informatics, and Research". More info at www.federaltelemedicine.com.

- Infomedix is a contact magazine for the medical industry. It is sent free of charge in about 13.500 copies only to manufacturers, distributors, dealers, importers, exporters, wholesalers and agents in over 140 countries worldwide. To gain visibility or to enquire about Infomedix's services, please contact or visit www.infomedix.it.


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 ):

  • Tsunami victims receive treatment via satellite (ESA European Space Agency)
  • Telemedicine improves medical service accessiblity (NSIIA North Sweden Inward Investment Agency)
  • ISRO prescription: Expert docs for 85 remote areas (The Indian Express)
  • E-Health: Steps On The Road To Interoperability (Health Affairs)
  • Telemedicine recommended for rural areas (E-Health Insider)
  • Education on demand coming to a radiology department near you (Diagnostic Imaging)
  • Proper planning simplifies PACS implementation for small imaging centers (Diagnostic Imaging)
  • PACS/RIS/HIS integration drives workflow changes (Diagnostic Imaging)
  • Pacific Basin boasts novel tele-echocardiography link (Diagnostic Imaging)
  • Camera phones may make a doctor's house calls (CNN)

 
 

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