healthcare technology

At the World Medical Innovation Forum this week, participants were polled with a loaded question:

“Do you think healthcare will become better or worse from the use of AI?”

Across the respondents, 98 percent said it would be either “Better” or “Much Better” and not a single one thought it would become “Much Worse.” This is an interesting statistic, and the results were not entirely surprising, especially given that artificial intelligence was the theme for the meeting.

This continual stream of adoption of new technologies in both clinical and post clinical settings is remarkable. Today, healthcare is a technology operation. As a case in point, outside of the array of MDs and medical professionals presenting at the forum, there was clearly a strong, advanced technology thread weaved throughout the conversations of the traditional topics of pathology, radiology, bioinformatics, electronic medical records (EMR), and standard healthcare provider issues.

As an example, a panel of senior technology experts from Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Dell EMC, Qualcomm, and Google joined research and information officers from Partners Healthcare and Massachusetts General Hospital to discuss the challenges in what they called “Data Engineering in Healthcare: Liberating Value.” That is a serious title for a panel.

Data portability was clearly a key topic, as was security and the public cloud.

The underlying issue with the cloud is that the EMR was never really designed to be portable.

Health records existed with institutional walls, and were not originally intended for real time care, but more as a means of tracking costs and transactions as the patient traveled through the various systems. As the EMR has not only become more feature rich, the ability to mine that data inside of them with ML and AI methods is clearly at the forefront of everyone’s mind right now.

There was discussion of episodic systems wrapped in policy and technology – this really isn’t quite how we can gain the maximum knowledge from the healthcare version of a Digital Me. A digital object containing all of our many and varied health related attributes. The challenges of discussing how to best build a “marketplace” and healthcare data exchanges and how to integrate “data marts” with existing EMR systems was obvious.

Estonia and Finland have signed an agreement which will allow Finns to purchase prescription medication in Estonia via e-prescriptions by the end of December.

 

Estonians will receive reciprocal rights in 2019.

 

The two countries hope that the deal will set a precedent other EU members will follow.

 

In an interview with Euractiv, Estonian Health Minister Riina Sikkut said that it is common practice for healthcare professionals in Estonia to use the e-health system to exchange patient medical records.

 

“But it is also important for people who have a need for healthcare services abroad to have his or her health data available to a doctor, nurse or a pharmacist so that they could also provide quality healthcare services and continuity of care,” said Ms Sikkut.

 

One concern which has prevented such agreements gaining traction before now is that digital prescriptions being available EU-wide could lead to medical tourism.

 

“When Finnish digital prescriptions become valid in Estonia, pharmaceutical drugs can only be bought here by the person to whom the drug is prescribed,” Kaidi Kelt, chief executive of Benu Pharmacies in Estonia, told Baltic News Services (BNS). She added that the possibility of medical tourism can thus be ruled out, stating that a person cannot collect all of their acquaintances’ prescriptions and make regular trips to Estonia simply to buy pharmaceutical drugs in bulk.

 

“Pharmaceutical drugs vary in their price and there is no reason to presume that everything is always cheaper in Estonia,” explains Ms Kelt.

 

“All European pharmacists are keeping an eye on us. The success of this project between Estonia and Finland could pave the way for implementing cross-border digital prescriptions in other EU states as well.”

 

Estonia also wants to be one of the first to implement the exchange of patient history, as part of the EU’s e-Health Digital Service Infrastructure (eHDSI) project.

 

read more at https://emerging-europe.com/news/estonia-and-finland-sign-trailblazing-medication-deal/