On 5th and 6th of November, EPHA attended the “eHealth Acceptance Conference 2012”. Aimed at steering debate on how to improve people’s acceptance of eHealth, the event was organised by the project ICT for Health .
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT ) for health projects aims to improve the social capacities of citizens and medical professionals to use eHealth technologies in the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases.
The eHealth Acceptance Conference 2012 was divided into various thematic sessions that addressed issues such as patient empowerment, self-monitoring, and ICT Skills.
The main conclusions concerning public health were:
Stefan Lamme, (from the Hässleholm hospital, Sweden) opened the session on ‘Patient empowerment through lifelong learning and self-monitoring’ by saying that “information and technology (IT) applications can radically revolutionise and improve the way we do things”. The main eHealth challenges and limitations highlighted were:
. Challenges are different in different countries, depending on healthcare organisation; health insurance taxes; legislation for IT security; the economy; and different use of eHealth
. Concerning limitations, Mr Lamme stressed that “we have a lot of ICT systems but we are not using them properly”. According to Mr Lamme, the main problems are related with networks that are quite different; incompatible services; lack of architectural support (e.g. language related to devices) and resources; too much information for patient and healthcare professionals; and employees who do not want to change the way they are used to working.
. What will happen if we give patients full access to their own records? (This could lead to patient anxiety as they are likely to have little or no medical understanding); need for cooperation on a national and European level – cooperation takes time.
Over the course of the conference, a few eHealth tools under the ICT for Health project were presented:
- SALUDA – eLearning programme and electronic record for citizens with chronic heart disease – an instrument to improve the quality of life. SALUDA supports patient with chronic heart disease and consists of two parts: the learning program SALUDA WBT and the electronic patient record SALUDA EPR.
- Vivaport – Multilingual personal health portal that supports cross-border health care and allows to collect vital data for self-monitoring.
One of the main conclusions concerning these new tools was drawn by Werner Smidt, (European Forum for Telemedicine, Bad Segeberg, Germany). He mentioned that there can be significant savings to healthcare systems through eHealth, and that the effectiveness has already been demonstrated by scientific tests as shown by Neringa Karvelytė (Vilnius University Hospital Santariškių Klinikos, Vilnius, Lithuania).
The conference wrapped up with recommendations for the future fromRoland Trill (Flensburg University of Applied Sciences, Flensburg, Germany). Mr Trill stressed that eHealth needs to be widely accepted and implemented and that further programmes and courses in eHealth should be developed to ensure that citizen or patient empowerment is the outcome,.
– For further information please visit the eHealth Acceptance Conference 2012 website.
– The conference’s presentations.
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