eHealth Week 2011, the largest annual gathering of the pan-European eHealth communities, was held from Tuesday May 10th through Thursday May 12th last week in Budapest. The event brought together more than 2,300 delegates from 60 countries to participate in the numerous sessions and events of the week and share and discuss initiatives to promote the roll-out of health IT across the healthcare eco-system.
"We are very pleased with the results of the celebration of eHealth Week 2011, which for the first time took place in Eastern Europe, on occasion of the Hungarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. This year we have had the highest number of speakers -120- and the highest number of stakeholder events ever organized alongside the Ministerial eHealth Conference and the World of Health IT, the two main events of the week. With all of the co-located events that joined, eHealth Week has become the essential Health IT stakeholder platform for Europe," underlines Jeremy Bonfini, Executive Vice President, Global Services, HIMSS.
One clear area of growth was the IHE Interoperability Showcase, which focuses on implementing standards-based systems and applications using the Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) common interoperability framework. The showcase was one of the largest and most visited stands on the show floor, expressing the growing interest in experiencing and visualizing how systems can be interoperable.
The show floor also featured several country pavilions, including a Turkish pavilion and a Hungarian Innovation pavilion. Some of the world's largest companies were also represented including; AGFA, HP, EMC, Intel and T-Mobile which made up some of the 70 companies represented on the show floor.
A new arrival to eHealth Week, which completely sold out was LHIT (Leaders in Health IT) Symposium, a new executive level forum hosted by HIMSS Analytics Europe, designed to give top leaders from healthcare IT the tools and information to navigate in a changing healthcare landscape.
The event concluded with Otto Larsen, Head of the Danish National Health IT Department, inviting all stakeholders to participate in eHealth Week 2012, which promises to be the largest in eHealth Weeks' history with the 10th Anniversary of the High Level Ministerial Conference. eHealth Week 2012 will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, from 7-9 May , 2012.
The eHealth Ministerial Conference, (organized jointly by the European Commission and the EU member state that holds the Presidency of the Council of the EU) and the World of Health IT Conference & Exhibition, are the 2 main cornerstone events that form eHealth Week, which takes place annually in the country that holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
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