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Archive for the ‘MIE’ Category
Trying to find the room for this panel was problematic – for an informatics conference, information and communication has been rather poor. This panel session is titled “Open source eHealth applications and the Millennium Development goals for Africa”. The first speaker (from Columbia University, in USA) talked bout mHealth as an extension of ehealth, and the Global Villages project funded through WHO. The Global Observatory for ehealth has mhealth for health promotion as its first priority action area (PAA). This covers increased demand for health services and preservation of well being, disease surveillance and control, and health promotion through targeted media, eg through SMS for behaviour change communications. PAA number 2 is around supporting the health work force, and addresses telehealth/medicine consultation being migrated to mobile devices, and point of care support tools. PAA 3 is mhealth for service delivery, though emergency response systems, patient tracking and supply chain management. She pointed out that there are more mobile phones in Africa than in US and Canada together as of 2008. Among the challenges:
Other parts of the overall work are around supporting community health workers, eg through birth/death registries (linked to Open MRS). Andy Kanter, from The Millennium Villages project (MVP), Earth Institute at Columbia University. MVP is a partnership between Columbia University and national governments where the project is based. Focus is on lifting communities out of poverty and using affordable, science-based solutions to address Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). 11 countries (inc Senegal, Mali, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi). Three of the 8 MDGs are health related, and aim to improve care. The MVP (http://www.millenniumvillages.org/) aims to establish one clinic per 5000 people, with community health workers (1 per 100-200 homes). The MVG-Net information system is a bottom-up initiative, locally-owned and integrated with global reach. Hub and spoke model, collecting knowledge locally in communities; clinics are location for servers (often using solar power), and use Open MRS and paper systems to gather data. Aim to use technology to build on and improve existing workflows, and use standardised data elements, with forms matching what is on the computer screens. Another aim is to make the forms multilingual, drawing on one common data dictionary. Neal Lesh (D Tree International) talked about ‘Open source development of mobile applications to support community health workers (CHW)’. The idea is to develop a range of applications that can help CHW plan their work and collect data to help support treatment. Openrosa (www.openrosa.org) is a new consortium of organisations working on mobile applications to collect data; grew out of efforts to create mobile data collection for Open MRS. Anna Kramers, from Ericsson, talked about their co-operation in the Millennium Village Project. Future growth for mobile operators is seen as coming from emerging markets, and looking at subscribers paying around $US5 per month or less. Among the applications Ericsson (and probably others) are looking into is micro-remittances of money between mobile phones, as well as delivering education via mobile devices. As well as involvement in the MVP, Ericsson has an initiative in the Lake Victoria area to support fishermen, and the Gramjyoti project in India (described as ‘India’s first HSPA village). Ericsson is working with Sun to develop an open source JavaEE telecom application server.
Technorati Tags: mhealth, ehealth, open source, MIE, MIE2008, Africa, Millennium Development Goals 
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It is Tuesday afternoon and time for the IMIA Web 2.0 taskforce panel. George Mihalas, immediate past president of EFMI, introduced and chaired the panel. Peter started the panel session by giving a brief introduction to what Web 2.0 is and the scope of the IMIA Web 2.0 taskforce. Toni Contesti talked about new workflows, ‘Patient 2.0′, and asked whether the technology is ready to support new ways of working in healthcare. He introduced MDPIXX, developed in the Balearic Islands; it aims to address telemedicine, and many other areas. It stores cases and images, as well as YouTube-like videos and uses SNOMED terminology to categorise. Users can comment on cases that already exist in MDPIXX. Site users can create their own areas, and can customise information relevant to their own interests. Toni described the widget that they had created to allow easy upload of materials from the desktop. The MDPIXX tool is also used for teaching; Paz Martinez from the University of the Balearic Islands, talked about how she uses the platform in the School of Nursing and Physiotherapy. She sees Web 2.0-based education and supplementing, not substituting for, other forms of education. She uploads cases to MDPIXX and the students have to then access the materials and search relevant cases to the areas that they are studying. The students also make their own videos of proposed patient treatments, and discuss them in peer review group sessions. The students also upload comments and keywords, and the work is assessed by Paz as the educator. She has found positive and negative aspects from the students’ real-life use of the MDPIXX environment. The students do not feel that they are learning, even though they have good marks; they also tend to feel they have spent too much time on the system. Paz feels that critical thinking and teamwork improve. Ed Hammond talked about his experience of learning about Web 2.0, and how the use of applications like YouTube is natural for his grand-daughter. He introduced the XO computer (cost around $US200), and sees the interaction of such new developments with Web 2.0 as critical. He sees Web 2.0 as the single best up-to-date resource for news , tactics and strategies for health -he sees it as a pathway to the world community. He spoke of how people are using Web 2.0 to share experiences of disease through blogs and such, and how he uses Wikipedia and generally trusts the information found there. HL7 is using wikis to support productivity and different workflows, as itg helps viewing the evolution of the development of documents; he can work as closely with someone on the other side of the world as well as he can with someone in the same room. In closing, he asked questions such as ‘who do you trust?’, how to determine fact from fiction, but also that reputations can be built online that help in answering such questions. Margaret gave the last presentation of the session on her work using iPods and lecture podcasts in education, particularly with undergraduate nursing students. She talked of the need to engage students, and that her students are increasingly fluent in multimedia. She went on to discuss the possibilities of tools such as Second Life in education and healthcare. Among examples she presented were the use of avatars to expand opportunities for high-fidelity simulation. Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, MIE2008, MIE, education, online learning
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Ilias Iakovidis, Deputy Head of the eHealth Unit in INFSO DG and Media, European Commission, gave the afternoon keynote on the “EU eHealth agenda”. He began with some of his conclusions/summary, comprising messages to the academic community, which included: – innovation/invention is never the result of consensus (large projects of many partners do not lead to innovation) – so the EU needs to look at other ways to fund leading edge thinking. He says there is a need to distinguish between roadmapping on infrastructure and infrastructure on R&D; - organisations need to learn to say ‘no’ and decide on their primary focus, ie what they do best; - real life problems call for a high degree of multidisciplinary. He suggested that IMIA/EFMI WGs should not just meet at health informatics events, but should also meet at wider health/medical events. Within the FP7, the Commission is now starting to fund individuals to undertake projects. He gave an overview of how EC funding for health and ICT projects had evolved though the 90s and into the 21st century – from connecting people, through measuring information quality, through personal health systems, towards the focus now on fully understanding the disease for the first time, and bringing together environmental, genomic and phenomic data, etc into integrated health records. He contrasted the importance of quality of healthcare services, endogenous determinants, and lifestyle factors as influencing factors affecting health of individuals and populations. He says that ICT needs to give tools to people to manage their lfestyles. New FP7 investment is on personalisation of healthcare through personal health systems, patients avoiding medical errors, and predictive medicine (modelling/simulation of diseases through the ‘virtual human’). The Commission expects to soon launch communications on telemedicine and interoperability. The Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) research roadmap (2007) www.europhysiome.org has been developed by the EC project STEP. A VPH Network of Excellence has been set up with 8M Euro EC funds and 13 partners. In ending his talk, among his conclusions were: - projects need to get better as clinician and patient involvement; - international co-operation is needed (but often difficult).
Technorati Tags: MIE2008, MIE, Europe, European Commission, ehealth, FP7
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The opening keynote was given by Yunkap Kwankam, from the World Health organisation (WHO). He began by talking about the six point agenda for addressing gaps and improving public health identified by the current WHO Director General. Much of what he covered was similar to his Regensburg talk, but bears repeating.
“Technology is at its best when it serves a higher purpose,” he said - not an end in itself.
He sees a symbiotic relationship between ICT (information and communication technologies) and health and not only ICT developments affecting health, but also health needs affecting developments in ICT.
He noted that many countries with the greatest burden of disease have the most critical shortage of health professionals – and see technology supporting the delivery of the necessary education in these countries. One example is the free availability of Map of Medicine to African countries, and the success of ‘Mobile Map’ which has put the map on a PDA in a trial in Kenya. This, he says, is an example of taking the solution to the point of need, usually the point of care.
The Global Observatory for eHealth (Goe) is a WHO development that started in 2002 as a network of institutions that collect data on results of best practice in eHealth.
Two thirds of the 11 million children who die annually around the world do so from known causes for which there are low cost preventative measures; ICT and eHealth need to be applied to address this problem.
Among the building blocks combining to meet health system goals is the need for equitable distribution – but there is a digital divide in access to information that might be used to support health, and also gap in access to technology.
He explained that much of the WHO work in done through collaboration with other institutions in Collaborating Centre; there are 930 such centres in 99 member states – but there is only one dealing with eHealth (in Tromso, Norway). He made an open invitation to institutions to become collaborating centres in eHealth.
In concluding, he sees the need for people (not just technology) working through partnerships and collaboration. IMIA is one of the organisations working to collaborate in the eHealth area.
He ended with a postulate that 1 euro invested in ehealth equals 1 DALY (disability adjusted life year) saved, and invited work to prove or disprove it. Technorati Tags: WHO, eHealth, ICT, MIE, MIE2008
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After our 3 presentations, we opened the panel up for discussion of issues raised. Q - do Gen X etc have different attitudes to privacy? - will they care? - will this have an effect on healthcare, privacy, etc? - are we moving into a new era on attitudes? One audience member suggested that after the current generation there may be a backlash that values anonymity. We had some discussion of using social technologies to support distance education. Technorati Tags: MIE2008, blog, Web 2.0, Second Life, education, social technologies, contagious media
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This afternoon is the ‘krew’ panel at MIE2008 - Hansen, Murray and Oyri, “Health informatics 2.0, Web 3.0 and beyond: how evocative networks and transforming health and education”. I am going to try blogging the session ‘live’ and also put tweets (?) on Twitter. Peter gave an introduction to definitions of Web 2.0 and gave an overview of some of the things that the ‘krew’ have been doing around blogging events. Surprisingly few of the people attending the session (about 35) have used blogs, and very few of them actively blog or have their own blogs. More people seem to be on LinkedIn than on Facebook. Margaret talked about podcasts and the work she has been doing using them in nurse education. She provided a number of URLs for websites that show people how to create podcasts. She also talked about recording her lectures and making the podcasts available to students within a short period. She says that the majority of her students are addicted to technology, and is interested in user engagement issues around the use of new technologies. She finds her students very satisfied with podcast lectures - she finds students learn more with shorter podcasts. Margaret then moved on to thinking about Web 3D and virtual worlds (such as Second Life) as learning spaces. She gave an example of work using nursing ACLS skills in Second Life. She sees Second Life providing flexible learning environments, in particular in relation to simulations. She warned of the amount of work involved in creating 3D environments, and this may be a barrier to many educators. She says there is a need for research into learning outcomes on use of 3D worlds and Web 2.0 tools. She sees serious gaming as being at tghe forefront of future education. Karl was the last presenter; he began by saying there are 3 paradigms for analysing ICT - sociological, technical/science, and patient outcome-oriented and medical approaches (eg RCT). He pointed out that patients are using Web 2.0 applications. He mentioned the ideas of ‘contagious media’ and the viral and contagious models to describe the ways in which application awareness and use spreads. He asked whether the kind of commercial profiling models such as used by Amazon could be used in healthcare environments to target the information that might be given to, or directed at, patients. Karl gave a brief introduction to PHRs (personal health records) and said that many are developed by healthcare providers. He also gave an introduction to Google Health, the sorts of information that can be currently entered, and kinds of information that it links to. He pointed out that it is not possible to make one’s own notes in Google Health. He then moved on to some of his work on wireless technologies, and looked at how ubiquitous networks might link in to Web 2.0 applications. Technorati Tags: MIE2008, blog, Web 2.0, Second Life, education, social technologies, contagious media
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MIE2008, the 21st International Congress of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI), takes place from 25-28 May, 2008 in Goteborg, Sweden. Krew members Peter, Karl and Margaret will be there, and we hope to do a fair amount of blogging of the event itself, as well as the various meetings preceding it, which include the IMIA (International Medical Informatics Association) Board and General Assembly meetings.
Technorati Tags: EFMI, MIE2008, IMIA, MIE, Goteborg
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