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22 June 2010
FEATURED: mHealth
How Mobile Phone Technology Can Fight Maternal Mortality (UN Global News and Views)
Maternal mortality remains a major challenge to health systems worldwide. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), every minute, at least one woman died from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, about 585,000 women each year. To make matters worse, for every woman who dies in childbirth, 20 more suffer injuries, infection or disease (about 10 million women each year). And 4 million babies die before they are 30 days old. Millions more die from diseases such as malaria that has largely been eradicated in the developed world.....
In the fight against maternal mortality, ICT can critically reduce the incidence of maternal death numbers by: facilitating access to information and healthcare services, and reaching women with information to prevent unnecessary deaths and complications. Also, with the expansion of wireless networks, mobile technology is an important ally. It's the most rapidly adopted technology in history and represents an exciting opportunity to "reach the unreached".
:: Full Article
:: Related Link: Barriers and Gaps Affecting mHealth in Low and Middle Income Countries: Policy White Paper (May 2010 - The Earth Institute)
Source:CAMI 10 June 10
Scientific Articles
:: Definition of Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0: A Systematic Review (J Med Internet Res 2010;12(2):e18)
During the last decade, the Internet has become increasingly popular and is now an important part of our daily life. When new "Web 2.0" technologies are used in health care, the terms "Health 2.0" or "Medicine 2.0" may be used. The objective was to identify unique definitions of Health 2.0/Medicine 2.0 and recurrent topics within the definitions.
:: E-health integration and interoperability based on open-source information technology. (Wien Klin Wochenschr. 2010 May;122 Suppl 2:3-10)
The first relevant and frequently cited definition of E-health was published in 2001. "E-health is an emerging field in the intersection of medical informatics, public health and business, referring to health services and information delivered or enhanced through the Internet and related technologies. In a broader sense, the term characterizes not only a technical development but also a state of mind, a way of thinking, an attitude and a commitment to networked global thinking, to improve health care locally, regionally, and worldwide by using information and communication technologies."
:: Getting seamless care right from the beginning - integrating computers into the human interaction. (Stud Health Technol Inform. 2010;155:196-202)
The digital age is coming to the health space, behind many other fields of society. In part this is because health remains heavily reliant on human interaction. The doctor-patient relationship remains a significant factor in determining patient outcomes. Whilst there are many benefits to E-Health, there are also significant risks if computers are not adequately integrated into this interaction and accurate data are consequently not available on the patient's journey through the health system.
:: Sentinel e-health network on grid: developments and challenges. (Stud Health Technol Inform. 2010;159:134-45)
Grid technologies have proven their capabilities to settle challenging problems of medical data access. The grid ability to access distributed databases in a secure and reliable way while preserving data ownership opened new perspectives in medical data sharing and disease surveillance. This paper focuses on the implementation challenges of grid-powered sentinel networks within the e-sentinelle project. This initiative aims to create a lightweight grid dedicated to cancer data exchange and enable automatic disease surveillance according to definition of epidemiological alarms. Particularly, issues related to security, patient identification, databases integration, data representation and medical record linkage are discussed.
:: Setting core standards: privacy, identity & interoperability. (Stud Health Technol Inform. 2010;156:32-9)
This position paper focuses on strategic developments and underlying concepts emerging out of the standards and associated domains. It addresses the issue of personal privacy in the wider context of interoperability across an ever-growing range of e-health and social care support systems and processes. These will increasingly be driven by major growth in the elderly segment of national populations where unambiguous identification of both patients and care staff both in hospitals and the community will become significant issues. This is particularly so where remote patient monitoring and access control to personal data is concerned, and is further complicated where racial, cultural and linguistic barriers are prevalent.
:: Sharing Health Data for Better Outcomes on PatientsLikeMe (J Med Internet Res 2010;12(2):e19)
PatientsLikeMe is an online quantitative personal research platform for patients with life-changing illnesses to share their experience using patient-reported outcomes, find other patients like them matched on demographic and clinical characteristics, and learn from the aggregated data reports of others to improve their outcomes. The goal of the website is to help patients answer the question: "Given my status, what is the best outcome I can hope to achieve, and how do I get there?"
:: Online Communication Between Doctors and Patients in Europe: Status and Perspectives (J Med Internet Res 2010;12(2):e20)
Use of the Internet for health purposes is steadily increasing in Europe, while the eHealth market is still a niche. Online communication between doctor and patient is one aspect of eHealth with potentially great impact on the use of health systems, patient-doctor roles and relations and individuals' health. Monitoring and understanding practices, trends, and expectations in this area is important, as it may bring invaluable knowledge to all stakeholders, in the Health 2.0 era.
:: The Next Public Health Revolution: Public Health Information Fusion and Social Networks (July 2010, Vol 100, No. 7 | American Journal of Public Health 1237-1242)
Social, political, and economic disruptions caused by natural and human-caused public health emergencies have catalyzed public health efforts to expand the scope of biosurveillance and increase the timeliness, quality, and comprehensiveness of disease detection, alerting, response, and prediction. Unfortunately, efforts to acquire, render, and visualize the diversity of health intelligence information are hindered by its wide distribution across disparate fields, multiple levels of government, and the complex interagency environment. Achieving this new level of situation awareness within public health will require a fundamental cultural shift in methods of acquiring, analyzing, and disseminating information. The notion of information "fusion" may provide opportunities to expand data access, analysis, and information exchange to better inform public health action.
eHealth Worldwide
:: Africa: Funding to Create Telehealth Network (Federal Telemedicine News - 16 June 2010)
The World Bank approved $63.66 million to create a regional network of 25 public health laboratories across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda. The network operating across country borders, will improve access to diagnostic services so that vulnerable populations in cross border areas will be able to make optimal use of internet and mobile communications.
:: Australia: Australia to get optional EPR (eHealth Europe - 11 June 2010)
The Australian Government has announced plans to spend €331m (£275m) over the next two years to provide an electronic patient record for every citizen. The plans, outlined in the government's 2010-11 budget papers, show that each patient that opts into the plans will have a summary of their health information held electronically.
:: Croatia: Primary healthcare practices going paperless (ePractice.eu - 17 June 2010)
'Paperless Practice' is a project for the computerisation of primary care practices in Croatia. Its purpose is to streamline the healthcare system, reduce costs and establish a single and uniform data collection system, so as to promote health and prevent diseases. The project is worth HRK 55 million (approx. €7.6 million). The contract for upgrading the national primary healthcare IT system covers the maintenance, installation and implementation of new functionalities in the already existing Croatian primary healthcare IT system. It plans to connect a large number of primary care actors thanks to the computerisation of key business processes and the introduction of new ways of working that will enable a more effective and efficient functioning of the system.
:: Czech Republic: Personal health records orderable and easily accessible online (ePractice.eu - 14 June 2010)
The use of these electronic health records (EHR, in English - eZk, in Czech) is becoming standard for both the general public and healthcare professionals. The new online registration method is fast, simple and entirely free of charge - and so is the record keeping. A few days after completing the online registration form, the users will receive by traditional mail the codes needed to access their eZk. Before the first connection to their eZk, they must set up their personal password to be able to view their health record, fill out their personal details and write notes.
:: Estonia: Patient opportunities in the estonian electronic health record system. (Stud Health Technol Inform. 2010;156:171-7)
Estonia is the first country which has implemented a nationwide electronic health record system and gives full access to its citizens. This provides new opportunities to citizens, healthcare providers and e-health developers. Combining health data, citizens' self added health and welfare data, decision support and possibilities of service oriented architecture of the Estonian Electronic Health Record System - a new era of e-health services can begin.
:: Estonia: Rules and Access Rights of the Estonian Integrated e-Health System. (Stud Health Technol Inform. 2010;156:245-56)
There should be a clear understanding that when implementing an electronic health record system (EHR), one of the hardest problems we have to solve is the access rights. In Estonia this process lasted for three years and involved all stakeholders of the healthcare sector. Special ethical committee was established to advise the decision makers and doctors to help them understand the ethical dilemmas from the patient's and society's point of view. In this article you will find a short overview of the access rights of the system, roles of the healthcare systems' employees.
:: Europe: eHealth usage patterns of European general practitioners: A five-year (2002-2007) comparative study (8 June 2010 - Int J Med Informatics)
This paper provides a five-year (2002-2007) comparative segmentation analysis of how the Internet and dedicated health networks are used by European general practitioners (GPs) and the extent to which external factors affect their use of various eHealth services.
:: Europe: EU launches 27 health IT projects (eHealth Europe - 17 June 2010)
The European Union has launched 27 e-health projects this year following a call under the EU Framework Programme 7 (FP7). The Seventh Research Framework Programme, which runs until 2013 with a budget of €50 billion, has launched projects in three key areas; ICT for personal health systems, ICT for patient safety, and international cooperation on virtual physiological human.
:: Malawi: Health Institutions in Malawi Implement Digital Information System (IICD - 7 June 2010)
The system was set up by request of the Nkhoma Synod Health Department. The department was impressed with the IICD-supported HMIS system in Tanzania. With the support of IICD's Tanzanian partners, the system was implemented in Malawi.
:: US: A Call to Promote Medical Innovation (The Council for American Medical Innovation - 10 June 2010)
The Council for American Medical Innovation (CAMI), launched in 2009, has brought together leaders in research, medicine, public health, academia, education, labor, and business, who are working in partnership to encourage public policies that advance medical innovation and the development of lifesaving treatments, enhance job growth, and promote patient access. CAMI believes leadership in medical innovation is a key part of America's economic recovery, future prosperity and health.
Opinions
:: BioMed Analysis: Conventional innovation isn't enough (SciDev - 17 June 2010)
Innovating for health is about more than drug development. It means new ways of delivering and using existing technologies, says Priya Shetty. Innovation is the driving force of progress, without which efforts to improve global health will always fall short of the mark, irrespective of how many millions of dollars are pumped in. It has been encouraging that for some time there has been support for stimulating innovation to tackle diseases of the poor in developing nations. But conventional health innovation can be a risky business. Investigating a new drug or vaccine can cost millions of dollars and frequently ends in failure, ....
:: IT's Return on Investment Is Tricky to Pin Down (Hospital and Health Networks - June 2010)
As the rush intensifies to meet mandates for more health care information technology, hospitals must ensure they are getting solid returns on IT investments. Calculating accurate ROI, however, can be difficult. The problem is, hospitals typically measure ROI from a business perspective—cost, revenues or operating efficiencies—but many benefits of clinical applications fall into quality and safety realms that do not easily translate into dollars.... "If the project is strategic in nature or a government mandate, ROI calculations are limited," says Denver Health Chief Information Officer Gregg Veltri.
:: Does the Internet Make You Smarter? (Wall Street Journal - 4 June 2010)
Ushahidi, the Kenyan crisis mapping tool invented in 2008, now aggregates citizen reports about crises the world over. PatientsLikeMe, a website designed to accelerate medical research by getting patients to publicly share their health information, has assembled a larger group of sufferers of Lou Gehrig's disease than any pharmaceutical agency in history, by appealing to the shared sense of seeking medical progress.
:: The doctor's in-box (Los Angeles Times - 7 June 2010)
Experts say using e-visits enables doctors to respond more quickly to patient concerns and keep in-office slots open for those who really need to see a physician in person. ...."Not all issues require face-to-face visits," says Dr. Kevin Pho, an internal medicine physician at Nashua Medical Group in New Hampshire and author of the popular medical blog, Kevinmd.com. "Face to face visits are inconvenient for the patient and expensive, and I think health insurers are starting to realize that compensating for e-visits can not only be a cost-saving measure but can also help with patient care."
:: Doctors and Hospitals Say Goals on Computerized Records Are Unrealistic (The New York Times - 7 June 2010)
One of most revealing assessments came from Dr. Thomas H. Lee, president of the physician network at Partners HealthCare. "Effective use of electronic health records will greatly improve patient safety, quality and efficiency," Dr. Lee said in a letter to Medicare officials. But he said the approach taken by the administration was based on "unrealistic expectations" and "unachievable timelines."
For more information, please contact ehir@who.int . Related links www.who.int/ehealth
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