JETZT KENNEN LERNEN! Mail: abo@e-health-com.eu - Fasmed

Dr. Arne Björnberg
Vice-President Health
Consumer Powerhouse,
Brüssel/Stockholm
Opening Inspirations 1
Dr. Arne Björnberg
Vice-President Health Consumer Powerhouse,
Brüssel/Stockholm
23. September, 09:05 – 09:25
28 eHealthCare.ch Konferenz
Konferenz
E-health and the consumer
empowerment – how does Switzerland
perform in a European context?
Healthcare is not only the largest single industry on Earth – it is also the
most information-intensive. Corporations such as Citibank or Allianz believe
that they are processing vast quantities of information. That might be so,
but the fact remains that one single 1000-bed university hospital generates
more Gigabytes of clinical information than any large corporation in banking
or fi nancial services – more than 2 Terabytes per year, not counting
digitalized diagnostic images.
Historic themes in European e-health
Under-investment
Healthcare systems across the globe have historically
under-invested in information technology
over decades. Kevin Dean from Cisco Systems
Internet Business Solutions observes: «In some
ways the industry is 10-20 years behind. I repeatedly
come across healthcare systems and
organisations spending less than 1% of their
turnover on IT.»
IT budgets often fi rst to be squeezed
Historically IT budgets have always been squeezed
fi rst to meet increases in areas like pay and
drugs bills. Further diffi culties have been created
by the fact that healthcare is usually delivered
through fragmented delivery organisations
and networks, making it very diffi cult to
co-ordinate IT investments centrally.
Healthcare a co-operative activity
While other industries such as banking or retail
can mandate single uniform solutions, healthcare
tends to be a much more co-operative activity.
Typically it is the antithesis of a supply
chain controlled by a single big player, but instead
a co-operative activity with many local
decision makers taking policy and investment
decisions on ICT. This means that ICT vendors
often face high procurement costs and need to
sell and respond to multiple customers.
Why invest in e-Health?
E-health is not primarily a strategy for saving
marginal administrative costs. One very basic
problem of healthcare delivery, when regarded
as an industry, is that the key «production units»
– patients – are mobile and appear as customers
largely at their own discretion. More or less, the
only feasible way to achieve a rationalized, streamlined
production line in healthcare is to use
e-Health solutions to create the «complete vir-
tual patient»; i.e. the complete, updated record
of a patient, accessible over the Internet to any
healthcare professional who the patient feels
inclined to aloow such access.
Once that virtual patient has been created,
healthcare delivery stands a chance to become
as up to date as the delivery of other professional
services: What today is only too frequently
an uncoordinated chain of single events, can
become a true clinical pathway, giving the patient
greater security and the more benefi ts delivered
over a shorter period of calendar time
than in the present un-coordinated fashion.
As other industries have been showing since the
early 1980’s, cost savings in the order of 30 –
50% can be achieved, while at the same time
providing better quality services and greater
cus tomer empowerment.
Main strategies – Oracle or Google?
For creating the complete «virtual patient», there
are two main types of strategies: One, where
all clinical information about the patient is gathered
in a large central database (the «Oracle»
solution), and one where all the clinical information
is retained in the system of the clinic
originally producing it, and requested over a
network (the Internet) by other care providers
whenever required.
The cost of any IT system is basically proportional
to the transaction volumes. In healthcare,
the portion of clinical information ever likely to
be requested by a clinic other than that originally
producing it, is in the order of 3 – 5% of
the total information content. This means, that
an «Oracle» solution will be generating 20 – 30
times higher transaction volumes than a
«Google» solution, where all clinical information
is stored in the IT systems of clinics originally