5 - 7 April 2011, Berlin, Germany.Modern medicine is a team effort. Be it in cancer medicine, cardiovascular medicine or neuropsychiatry: hospitals, mobile doctors' surgeries and other treatment facilities are cooperating ever more closely. The only way to efficiently organise such joint ventures is through electronic networking. At conhIT 2011 users and IT companies will be reporting on integration solutions.
"Handling regional joint venture scenarios in the healthcare system using IT applications requires a secure infrastructure for transmitting medical data", says Professor Peter Haas, medical IT specialist at Fachhochschule Dortmund. It is true that over the past few years, due to political reasons, the introduction of a Germany-wide telematics infrastructure for the German healthcare system has been considerably delayed, "however, we are now seeing substantial efforts to establish regional networks which, to a limited extent at least, are implementing the backbone of a secure infrastructure", he adds.
Digital cross-sectoral communication pays dividends
The initiators of many of these projects will be present at conhIT 2011, the meeting place of the healthcare IT industry. Thus several sessions and lectures at the conhIT Congress will be devoted to the key topic of "Integration and Networking". Visitors to conhIT will be able to observe first-hand how regional networking systems are being put into practice.
For example, more and more healthcare IT companies are integrating the so-called electronic case files used by hospitals into their information systems. "Case files make it possible for cooperating hospitals as well as hospitals and referring physicians to exchange patient records both quickly and securely", says Volker Lowitsch, the head of the IT department at Universitätsklinikum Aachen.
Lowitsch is one of several speakers who will be focusing on the topic of cross-sectoral communication at the conhIT Congress. He points out that exchanging data electronically among partners is already paying dividends for medical facilities. Thus at the Thorax, Heart and Vascular Surgery Clinic in Aachen, for instance, the number of referrals has increased while the average time patients are kept has dropped.
VhitG standard medical report is now widely accepted
"Customers are becoming more and more aware of cross-sectoral electronic communication, and we are approaching the stage where we are putting it into practice", says Matthias Meierhofer, a member of the board of the German Association of the Healthcare IT Industry (VHitG) which, as in previous years, is coorganizing conhIT 2011 with Messe Berlin.
As an industry association VHitG has itself done much to promote the interoperability of healthcare IT solutions and in doing so to pave the way for regional joint venture models. The introduction of the VhitG medical report has established a widely accepted standard which makes it easier to integrate referred patients' records into the respective information system.
As with many standardization schemes, even though a breakthrough has been achieved, it has yet to pass its practical test. "A standard medical report is not available everywhere yet. However, in those cases in which an electronic medical report is already being replaced, the VhitG standard will subsequently come into use. There is no longer any talk of alternative industry standards"2, says Andreas Lange, Chairman of the Board of VHitG.
For further information, please visit:
http://www.conhit.com
conhIT - connecting healthcare IT
conhIT targets decision-makers in IT departments, management, in the medical profession, nursing, doctors, doctors' networks and medical care centres who need to find out about the latest developments in IT and healthcare, meet members of the industry and make use of opportunities for high-level advanced training. As an integrated event, over a period of three days conhIT combines an Industrial Fair, a Congress and Networking Events which are of particular interest to the industry. Launched in 2008 by the German Association of the Healthcare IT Industry (VHitG e.V.) and organized by Messe Berlin, this event recently recorded 200 exhibitors and 3,500 visitors and has now become Europe's leading event for the healthcare IT sector.