During the last 20 years, the European Commission has invested more than € 1.4 bn into eHealth projects and eHealth related research. “For the EC, eHealth continues to be an ongoing endeavor, but we have certainly made enormous progress already”, said EC-representative Loris Di Pietrantonio in a discussion that was organized by HealthTech Wire as part of this year’s conhIT in Berlin. A vivid healthcare IT event like conhIT would have been unthinkable ten years ago, Di Pietrantonio pointed out. And he congratulated the organizers to their successful meeting.
Di Pietrantonio gave a broad overview on the EC’s eHealth activities and on the funding options that are available for eHealth projects of various kinds. In particular, he drew attention to the Virtual Physiological Human project, a basic eHealth research project with a total budget of € 66.5mn in 2011/2012. Closer to patient care, the EC is currently funding the epSOS project on crossborder interoperability and the Renewing Health project that aims at building up evidence for a broad implementation of telemedicine services.
Details of the Renewing Health project were presented by Stephan Schug of the European Health Telematics Association (EHTEL). Renewing Health was officially launched in February 2010. It aims to improve service to people suffering from diabetes, COPD and cardiovascular disease. Renewing Health is a large scale clinical trial that takes place in nine different European regions. “The goal is to demonstrate the benefits of telemedicine once more, and by doing so to contribute to it becoming part of regular care for European patients”, said Schug.
Falk Schubert of the German ministry of health gave an update on the epSOS project that involves 48 beneficiaries from 23 countries. The aim of epSOS is to give doctors easy access to relevant medication data and to the relevant parts of the individual patient history when a European citizen has to be treated outside of his or her home country. Schubert pointed out that it was important to respect the different privacy cultures in different European countries in order to make epSOS a success. He also said it was still open whether Germany will continue with the epSOS services after the end of pilot project.
How relevant a truly close cross-border cooperation can be for an individual patient is illustrated by the Sim-e-Child project, an eHealth research project under the FP 7 funding program. It was introduced by Michael Suehling from Siemens. Sim-e-Child is developing a grid-enabled platform for simulations in paediatric cardiology. It integrates patient-specific models of heart anatomy, function and hemodynamics in order to enable a far more individualized care management and prevention management in children with congenital diseases of the aortic arch.
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Quelle/Source: HealthTech Wire, 07.04.2011
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