This year, EHTEL's "Imagining 2029" edition was structured in two tracks: Innovation and Transformation.
Innovation focused on important topics like European Health Data Spaces, data governance, and citizen-centric data sharing. Transformation, in turn, concentrated on crucial issues such as the collaborative management of medicines and medication health records, the evolution of health data standardisation, and the governance of digital health.
The circular relationship between innovation and transformation
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These two tracks, innovation and transformation, are intimately related to each other. They are vital to making ongoing progress on Europe’s health and care scene and ensuring the digitisation of both. They are crucial in achieving improved citizen and patient health, enhanced health and care systems and services, and a successful Europe that can thrive – societally, organisationally, and industrially – rather than simply survive. |
EHTEL’s Imagining 2029 Work Programme for 2022 provided a “bird's eye view” on the evolutionary process and organisations of health and care systems. In the words of EHTEL’s General Secretary, Marc Lange: “No roots without leaves; no leaves without roots.” Hence, “No innovation without transformation; no transformation without innovation.”
This inter-relationship makes for a complementary, continuous circular flow. It implies an ongoing inter-dependence between innovation and transformation.
Each Imagining 2029 track has a different orientation and is intended to attract different audiences. Both tracks, however, respect EHTEL’s multistakeholder platform approach, bringing together the richness and variety of EHTEL’s membership and stakeholder communities.
A third set of activities around exploitation was also planned.
Innovation track
Innovation focused on topics like data governance and citizen-centric data sharing. The general background context is of the European Health Data Space (or spaces). Topics that were in focus involve knowledge management; interoperability; architecture; data sharing; data governance; and all sorts of processes. Interoperability includes semantic interoperability.
Overall, the track provided a forward-looking view of digital health innovations and how these innovations will impact on the health and care sectors. The track brought the last two years’ results of Imagining 2029 into today’s future. It continued to build on the previous work of Imagining 2029.
Workshops
Three workshops planned for 2022 had themes related to a number of innovations and EHTEL priorities. The innovations include interoperability and knowledge management, citizen-centric data-sharing, and platform architecture and processes.
- “Semantic interoperability - are we now ready to meet the challenge?”
- Date: 25 April 2022
- “Data sharing that is citizen-centric” at HIMSS 2022
- Date: June 2022
- “Enabling architecture and processes: Key findings from Open DEI platforms”
- Date: 29 November 2022 - as part of the EHTEL 2022 Symposium Session 8.
Further innovative topics are also being considered. They include progress made on citizen engagement and the work of data intermediaries.
Transformation track
This track facilitated the sharing of experiences among European competence centres. It focused on the technical and organisational transformations that they are working on. It provides an opportunity to look at today’s context of “what is happening now?” After “letting go”, the idea is to open up to “what needs to come next in the future?”. The track continues to build on the previous editions of Imagining 2029, especially “Hybrid care: mainstreaming virtual care with new models of care”. It brought recent results from 2020-2021 initiatives up-to-date, and show what needs to happen to face the future.
Transformation focused on responding to members' current needs for knowledge sharing. It looked at cross-border integrated medication records, the exchange and sharing of health data standards, and the governance of health data. It looked at health and care organisations today, and how they can be transformed in the future. The aim is that they will navigate successfully into and through the new era of hybrid models of care.
Workshops
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- Date: 28 March 2022
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“Deploying FHIR: How to co-engage public and private players?”
- Date: 12 May 2022
- “Reshaping the Digital Health Governance – The Estonian use case”
- Date: 15 December 2022
The convergence between innovation and transformation
At the end of 2022, both tracks – innovation and transformation – converged together in the organisation of the 2022 EHTEL Symposium. Held in November 2022, the synergies and inter-relationships between the two tracks acted as the basis of the Symposium design.