It’s a bright and sunny morning here in Durban; the rain has gone and the wind settled somewhat. Last night was the Gala Dinner for the conference - a very well-organised event with some nice ‘branding’ touches, and a good menu - it augers very well for the social events for medinfo2010.

The event closes at lunchtime today and has an interesting-looking programme covering open source and telehealth education and training. More to follow.

Technorati Tags: open source, South Africa, telehealth

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The second session this morning is devoted to eHealth strategies, although began with Lyn Hanmer giving an introduction to medinfo2010 (www.medinfo2010.org).

Dr Shaheen Khotu, Chief Information Officer at the Department of Health, and a colleague, gave a keynote on ‘An e-Health Strategy for South Africa’. The strategy document is based on the ANC Health Plan, the Presidential Advisory Council on ICT, Millennium Development Goals, a focus on rural nodes, as well as on wider international declarations of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The vision is based in all South Africans having access to affordable, good quality health care, through optimal use of ICT to generate, capture, store and use digital data for clinical, educational and administrative purposes. Part of the aim of the eHealth policy is to overcome the digital divide between rural and urban populations; an ethical framework for effective use of eHealth by health professionals is also flagged up.

Karl Brown, from The Rockefeller Foundation, spoke on ‘ Global partnerships, local solutions’. He spoke of challenges of global health in coming years, including emergence and rapid spread of new viruses, and human resource problems. He noted that across a wide range of countries, health spending increases faster than does GDP - and in USA, on current trends, by 2080, healthcare spending could approach 50% of GDP.

He talked of a health systems approach to improve efficiency, equity and quality of health systems through policy, capacity development and technology (through eHealth). The ICT infastructure, especially through growth of cellphone use in the global south, is developing, to potentially support ehealth developments. He also emphasised the need for interoperable systems and data standards, and the fact that South African commitment to this puts it ahead of other countries which are still reliant on ’stovepipe’ (silo) development of systems.

He flagged up the forthcoming Bellagio conferences ‘Making the eHealth connection’ - www.ehealth-connection.org

The morning session finished with a panel session on ‘Challenges and synergies in developing regional eHealth systems’. Sarah Asiimwe, the presenter from the Ugandan Ministry of Health talked of problems of many platforms for eHealth being developed elsewhere and not contextually placed, addressing local needs, which causes problems in local implementations. She also identified human resource problems with low numbers of suitably skilled ICT professionals, as well as insufficient institutions to produce the necessary local capacity. Among synergies for eHealth strategies, she suggested development of open source platforms (such as OpenMRS) and the need to develop fora that allow regional participation for development of standardisation, plus the need to invest in the development of local capacity. The speaker from Rwanda spoke of different levels of understanding and awareness of what eHealth means (eg some people/countries may see it as EHR development, while others may see it as telehealth applications). He also spoke in similar vein to the Ugandan speaker of the problems of trying to locally customise off-the-shelf ICT systems from other countries.

Technorati Tags: South Africa, eHealth, strategy, medinfo2010

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Evelyn Hovenga kicked off the closing plenary session and introduced Ken Rubin, Chief Healthcare Architect for EDS. He noted he had an unenviable task of trying to summarise the lessons of the week. He aimed to talk about sustainable systems, which he described (by Wikipedia) as a ‘characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely’.

At present, he says, we have integration within systems and organisations, but often not across boundaries. His future vision is health IT to improve healthcare and outcomes and health status. As part of solutions, he talked of eliminating unplanned redundancies (of data and systems), integrated security management, instituting versioning of ontology and data (to be able to look back historically at what earlier versions of clinical events and records), workflow improvement (by pitting right tools in hands of the caregivers), developing ‘wrapper’ for existing applications with SOA, and ability to budget, plan and execute software development repeatedly.

He closed with a charge to people to remember that the discipline is about health, informatics is part of a broader ecosystsm, and organisations will need to adapt to embrace change. Success, he says, will lie in ability to cross traditional boundaries in moving obstacles to improving care. Systems that are not used are not useful, he says, and if not embraced by clinicians they will not be used. We need, he says, to create a sustainability culture, and embrace agility and continuous improvement.

Nancy Lorenzi, outgoing IMIA President, presented the IMIA Award for Excellence, co-sponsored by IMIA and UMIT, to Jan van Bemmel. In his presentation, Jan’s presentation was titled ‘Reflections on curiosity’ (with quotes from Albert Einstein). Curiosity was the core of Plato’s philosophy, he said, and a true researcher is open to surprises and serendipity. Quoting Einstein: ‘The important thing is not to stop questioning’.

Charles Safran presented the student, paper and poster awards. Judging criteria included presentation, content and interaction to try and judge between many good presentations. The best paper winner was Cornelia Ruland and colleagues’ paper on ‘Children’s contributions to designing a communication tool for children with cancer’. The best poster was Stephan Spat with ‘Multi-label text classification of German language medical documents’. The student paper winner was Diego Lopez from Germany on ‘Connecting public health and clinical information systems using a standardised methodology’.

Nancy Lorenzi handed over the gavel to the new IMIA President, Reinhold Haux, from Germany who will be President from 2007-2010. Reinhold presented his five aims for his presidency. He noted that a communique had been issued to strengthen the collaboration between WHO and IMIA; IMIA is the only NGO of WHO in the ehealth space, and both will strengthen co-operation, in particular in three areas: the global observatory for ehealth; the use of ICT for the development of the health workforce, and the sharing of products and services related to intellectual property.

The plenary (and medinfo2007) closed with a presentation by the medinfo2010 team.

Technorati Tags: medinfo2007, medinfo2010, IMIA

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It is Friday morning and we are already near the end of medinfo2007. This morning there will be the final round of morning plenaries (which I think Scott intends blogging), then some more papers and panels, and then the closing ceremony after lunch, which will include the change of IMIA Presidents and the handover to medinfo2010.



As always, the time has flown by with a mix of meetings, planned and unplanned, as people try to catch up with colleagues they may not have seen for 3 years since the last medinfo.

Technorati Tags: medinfo2007, IMIA

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