1st World of Health IT Exhibition and Conference
by Guido Gebhardt
The World of health IT (WHIT) conference, the first event of its kind, attracted a hundred of vendors.
Around 1,500 visitors , including leaders and experts in health IT from Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) came to the World of health IT conference in Geneva.
Addressing the perspectives of clinicians, directors and other healthcare professionals, the event provided educational sessions, trade exhibits, best practice exchange networking sessions and other professional development opportunities. It is designed to bridge the gap between public policy and the realities of day-to-day implementation.
To quote the European Commission: ‘eHealth is all about better healthcare for less money and forms, the major challenge facing Europe’s healthcare systems’. eHealth is already being flagged up as potentially the third largest industry in the healthcare sector and looks set to account for up to 5% of the EU´s healthcare budget by 2010.
Today, information and communication technologies are used by the full range of healthcare professionals. But among the challenges facing the industry are how to gain the best return on investment in a rapidly changing workplace, how to bring members of the healthcare community together – not just in Europe, but in the Middle East and Africa – to discuss best practice, and how to put users in touch with eHealth technology vendors so the latter can meet the needs of the former.
Backed by the EC, the WHO, and others, including Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Siemens, Philips, Agfa and Kodak, the event showcased the cutting edge of eHealth technology.
WHIT is not designed to give information on, for example, digitising a hospital. It takes a far more pan-European or even worldwide perspective, to set up a global eHealthcare infrastructure for an international exchange of patient data, or bringing health information to people with no internet access. So the political topics might not be of interest for hospital CEOs. The WHIT appears more of a congress for healthcare lobbyists and strategists than of healthcare engineering.
CEOs are mainly interested in solutions tailored to the needs of their home country. And this is the big difference from the USA’s view of HIMSS: The variety of languages and systems in Europe is too large, here one system doesn’t fit all.
Close to 2,000 people attended the conference and exhibition, which featured 120 speakers including Baroness Emma Nicholson a Senior Member of the European Parliament, Michael Bainbridge of the UK National Health Service, Claudio Beretta, general director of health for the Lombardy region of Italy, Maria Jesus Montero, minister of health for the Andalusia region and the Kuwaiti health minister, Sheik Ahmad Al-Abdullah Al Ahmad Al Sabah.
This article was published on 11/14/2006