Friday, September 21, 2012

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Health and Technology 2012 - Serious gaming = Serious business

Training of medical professionals can use serious gaming. Training became a serious issue for the European Design Center several years ago because doctors presented to them the fact that 36000 patients in the Netherlands have complications caused by errors during the intervention. In 1960 of these cases the patient dies because of these complications. It is expected that training could reduce this by 55%. This resulted in Medsim, a spinoff company where multidisciplinary teams work on training methods and devices for medical interventions. Medsim provides high tech and realistic simulators in a safe environment.

These training sessions are very expensive and cannot be done more than 2 or 3 times per year per team. To allow additional training, serious gaming could have a major role. In serious games fun = learning. An interesting result is that a study showed that high school kids were better in operating on a simulator than gynacologists.

A demonstration was given of the serious game in development called birthplay for gynacologists to practice delivery of a child in breech. It is a role playing game in which the player can assume different roles such as nurse or gynacologist.

Go to www.hat-congres.nl for acces to the presentations of the conference

Health and Technology 2012 - Doctor's case 2.0

Holland initiative for the tri-corder. Most of the diagnosis in the first line is referred by the GP, only a very small portion is performed by the GP. More diagnosis direcly performed by the GP could reduce healthcare costs significantly (approximately €900.000.000 per year in the Netherlands). A clear trend to group practices of GPs can be observed for flexiblity and cost efficiency. This trend could help to shift the diagnosis from the second to the first line (by GP).

Development and validation of medical devices and medical imaging informatics tools are a requirement to achieve this shift.

TNO has the ambition to develop within a period of 5 years the tricorder as anology to the tricorder used by dr McCoy in Star Trek. This tricorder should be used to provide test values that help the diagnosis as addition to the anamnese and the general impression/intuition of the GP. The tricorder should measure a list of 17 values within 5 minutes, be diagnostic effective with low false negative rate, and cost effective.

Go to www.hat-congres.nl for acces to the presentations of the conference

Health and Technology 2012 - Better care by secure data sharing

Presentation by two employees of NEN, the Dutch normalization institute. Medical technology and data sharing are getting more a joined issue. Legislation for medical technology/ devices is in place or developed, but legislation for medical data sharing are not specified yet. There are multiple standards and legislation relevant for medical devices and data sharing such as standards and legislation for ICT, quality and risk management, EU legislation, information exchange, apps and social media. Currently, projects are ongoing nationally and internationally to provide an overview of the available standards (e.g. By Nictiz in the Netherlands).

An important issue is that software is regarded to be a medical device and should apply to the legislation. The NEN has developed a decision tree to determine whether the software is a medical device or not.

This means that most software used in healthcare should be confirming to the guidelines and thus be tested and validated. To determine if software should be regarded tot be a medical device, the Intended use of the software is an important issue. The risk level of the software will dictate the requirements for approval.

These risk levels are:
1. No injury or damage to health is possible.
2. Non serious injury is possible.
3. Death or serious injury is possible.

Go to www.hat-congres.nl for acces to the presentations of the conference

Health and Technology 2012 - Towards empowerment for wellbeing and healthy living

Prof. Hummels started with a movie showing the problems in healthcare. Technology could help tackle a lot of the problems but the patient should be central. Fundamental science only is not the way to solve all problems, science for society is required to have the link to evereyday life. One of the areas of research of the TU/e are smart environments. The aim is empowerment of people to live healthy using technology.

Development and trends in health And healthcare are:
1. Aging and chronic diseases
2. Transforming the healthcare system
3. Healthy lifestyle: primary prevention
4. Integrative care
5. Unique personalized solutions
6. Self-management via networked technology
7. Ethics, safety and privacy

Technology trend such as social networking, knowledge economy could help tackle the challenges involved in healthcare if we can evolve to a transformation economy where solutions are developed locally with collaboration of involved stakeholders.

Smart environments involve staying healthy (prevention), empowerment in daily life, and making healthcare sustainable.

Go to www.hat-congres.nl for acces to the presentations of the conference

Monday, September 10, 2012

Virtual Surgery on iPad


Virtual surgery is a free iPad app to go through a surgical total knee replacement procedure. The app is fully narrated and interactive and also includes multiple choice questions to test the knowledge of the 'player'. This is really put on the market as being a serious game and is really well designed. Apps like these really show the ability of the iPad as an educational device.


Wednesday, September 5, 2012

OTech: Ready to throw out your RIS/PACS vendor: prevent t...

OTech: Ready to throw out your RIS/PACS vendor: prevent t...: 18% of the users are ready to throw out their system Our newsletter poll showed that 18 percent of current PACS users are unhappy with the current vendor and another 18 percent is very frustrated, which could be a good reason to consider switching vendors.

HL7 to license standards for free in 2013

Good news for the "Open" community!
Health Level Seven International (HL7), which develops interoperability standards for health IT, will make much of its intellectual property, including standards, freely available under licensing terms.
Read more here: HL7 to license standards for free in 2013