At the 6th Annual EHTEL Symposium 2014, speakers, panellists and delegates shared lessons on innovation in health and social care and their link to health outcomes; integrated care communities; telemedicine moving from theory to practice and other subjects. We also had a lively continuation from last year's debate on Big Data vs. Big Health.
The annual EHTEL Symposium brought together the European eHealth community – health policy leaders, strategic EU projects and initiatives, NGOs, industrialists and more stakeholders – to share lessons on:
- Integrated Care Communities and Dynamic Networking for Innovation in and across Europe
- Linking Innovation in Health and Social Care to Better Outcomes in Health and Daily Living
- Big Data = Big Health? Visions for Innovation through New Insights into Health and Wellbeing
- Transforming the Quantum Leap in Mobile Technologies into Tangible Health Outcomes for All
- Telemedicine Scaling from Pilots to Routine Care – the MOMENTUM Telemedicine Blueprint
- EHTEL's Innovation Cycle for Assessment, Innovation Governance and Collective Innovation
ENGAGED Open Multi-Community Workshop Communities and Networks for Innovation
This multi-community workshop convened experts from the EIP on AHA, the eHealth and the AAL ecosystems to validate – in a mutual learning environment – the Roadmap for future innovations in health and social care.
The workshop ran as a multi-centre setting with the Brussels venue linked through video conferencing with Ashford in the county of Kent, UK and Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain.
Linking Innovation in Health and Social Care to Better Daily Living
Chaired by Stephan Schug, EHTEL - this session pursued the high ambitions of the overall theme of the Symposium: Can (digital) innovations help societies to make a difference in terms of health outcomes or even in preventing/delaying the onset of disease?
Petra Wilson, CEO of the International Diabetes Foundation, introduced a demanding use case via breath-taking figures on the diabetes pandemic. Diabetes is currently the most demanding chronic condition in terms of both quality of life and life expectancy of the global population: numbers are expected to rise from nearly 400 million in 2014 to as many as 600 million people with diabetes worldwide in the year 2035. Likewise, a deficit of 13 million health professionals in their support is expected.
Yet digital innovations may help: big data supports prediction and plans on the population level, mHealth apps will support wellness and fitness to prevent diabetes as well as helping people with diabetes to manage their condition to improve their bets against diabetes complications.
Yoram Feldman of the Gertner Institute presented a promising approach for the remote support of people needing long-term rehabilitation from stroke. Serious health games combined with sophisticated remote support by physiotherapists helps to improve the functional outcome beyond the expectations and the patience of the traditional approach.
Methods and Steps of Innovation in Health and Social Care
Chaired by Prof George Crooks, OBE – Medical Director of NHS24, Scotland and then EHTEL President – this session provided participants with insight into the State of the Art of Innovation Research and grading systems for the maturity of innovations - particularly for service re-design (Prof Stuart Anderson, Edinburgh, Scotland).
Marc Lange (EHTEL) highlighted tools and methods for "scaling up" innovations in the telemedicine domain – starting from the MOMENTUM work on the Critical Success Factors for telemedicine in routine care – however extending the view to a broader set of tools to foster innovation in the domains of eHealth and Digital Health.
Dynamic Innovation and Integrated Care Communities
Chaired by Andrea Pavlickova, NHS24 Scotland, United Kingdom, this session highlighted the State of the Art of European Innovation partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA).
Following the introduction by DG SANCO, European Commission, a Maturity Model on Integrated Care based on a journey through six regional sites of excellence (Catalunya, the Basque country and Galicia in Spain; Saxony in Germany; Attica in Greece, and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom) was presented. Additional insight came from the Campania and Enschede Regions that jointly pursue Integrated Care with support of the Perssilaa and Beyond Silos projects.
Transforming the Quantum Leap in Mobile Technologies into Tangible Health Outcomes for All
Guided by Joan Cornet, Mobile Health Evangelist from MobileWorldCapital in Barcelona, the mHealth session provided the latest update on the Green Paper consultation process of the European Commission (Peteris Zilgalvis).
In the same framework, insight and recommendations have been distilled into two policy papers, i.e. the Civil Society position by the European Social and Economic Committee (Pavel Trantina) and the EHTEL recommendations (Line Linstad / Rachelle Kaye) on mobile health in the clinical and wellness domains. A real life use case – using a medical device certified smartphone App for therapy management of haemophilia (Martin Schulz) – inspired the debate and outlook on "transforming the quantum leap in mobile technologies into tangible health outcomes".
"Three paths to telemedicine deployment" - Fourth and Final Momentum Workshop
MOMENTUM is a Thematic Network that has built a community of telemedicine doers from different backgrounds and from across different European countries. It aims to advance telemedicine in routine care of European health systems.
This community has identified 18 critical success factors for starting and scaling-up well-defined telemedicine services. At the parallel session "Three paths to telemedicine deployment - Fourth and Final Momentum Workshop - facilitated by Michael Strübin, Continua Health Alliance - the network presented the lessons learned by early adopters and proceedings around the MOMENTUM Blueprint for scaling-up telemedicine.
EHTEL Innovation Workshop: Innovation Governance, Methods and Tools
The EHTEL Innovation Workshop (parallel session) was facilitated by Marc Lange, EHTEL. The EHTEL Innovation Initiative identifies good practices in incubating service innovation in healthcare with the objective to foster decision making towards scaling and mainstreaming its results. Besides welcoming speakers from innovation agencies in Galicia, Kent and Catalonia, participants listened to industry representative Matteo Melideo from Engineering, Rome and Jerome De Barros of AAL-Europe.
Big Data / Big Health: Visions for Innovation through New Insights into Health and Wellbeing
The 2014 Big Data session - chaired by Mário Romão, Intel, Brussels, Belgium – continued from a debate started at the 5th Annual EHTEL Symposium where participants gained many insights into the 'foundation' of the Big Data perspective like understanding the quantum leap in terms of processing speed and storage technology when processing huge data in short time.
The 2014 edition of the Big Data vs. Big Health debate took a closer look at the promises of Big Data for Health and Personalised Medicine (including linking them to privacy issues). Speakers represented a broad range of competencies and insights into the state of the art of computing in the life sciences.
Use cases from clinical and public health medicine demonstrated how the results of Big Data analyses can be concretely linked to improvements in health care and gains in health and wellness.
The 6th Annual EHTEL Symposium 2014 was kindly hosted by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), a consultative body that gives representatives of Europe's socio-occupational interest groups, and others, a formal platform to express their points of views on EU issues. Its opinions are forwarded to the larger institutions – the Council, the Commission and the European Parliament. It thus has a key role to play in the Union's decision-making process. To learn more, visit .
The EHTEL 2014 Symposium has been organised in close partnership with two projects:
- ENGAGED is a Thematic Network that has built a learning community of stakeholders from different backgrounds and from across different European countries. Its aim is to nurture the emergence of innovative and sustainable active and healthy ageing services that make best use of technology. In its final conference, ENGAGED emphasised its role as a sharing community bringing together people and groups interested in this field.
- MOMENTUM is a Thematic Network that has built a community of telemedicine doers from different backgrounds and from across different European countries. It aims to advance telemedicine in routine care of European health systems. This community has identified 18 critical success factors for starting and scaling-up well-defined telemedicine services. At the EHTEL symposium, the network presented the lessons learned by early adopters in the form of a Blueprint for scaling-up telemedicine.
Scroll down to find and download some of the resources made available to all EHTEL Symposium's participants.