From May 28-29, 2019, the dHealth – Health Informatics meets Digital Health “From eHealth to dHealth” was organised at Schloss Schönbrunn in Vienna, Austria.
“The dHealth (former: eHealth20XX) conference series has been organized by the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and the Austrian Working Group of Health Informatics and eHealth since 2007 with different partner institutions involved (UMIT until 2016, HIMSS Europe in the eHealth Summits 2013 to 2017 ). Each year, this event attracts 300+ participants from academia, industry, government and health care organizations. In keeping with its motto, “Health Informatics meets eHealth”, the event provides a platform for researchers, practitioners, decision makers and vendors to discuss innovative health informatics and eHealth solutions so as to improve the quality and efficiency of health care. It is the USP of this event that Research and Application meet as equals and provide new insights from both the scientific as well as the practical point of view.” [Source: https://www.dhealth.at/]
This year‘s conference focused on innovations and forthcoming tasks related to the ELGA and the eCard system in Austria as well as the digital support for people with rare diseases. There was an exciting lecture by the director of Orphanet Ana Rath, who presented the classification system ORPHA and presented a comparison to the ICD codes.
The conference demonstrated that Austria is making great progress related to the ELGA system. Standardization procedures for medical reports, discharge documents or status reports, which will further increase transparency in the healthcare system, avoid multiple examinations and improve the communication between healthcare provider are going to be further developed and professionalized. As Daniela Ströckl also perceived in dialogues with experts, medical informatics have a crucial role within the Austrian health landscape. Therefore cooperation with other partners in this field should be futher strengthened.
An AAL session with a focus on “Tele-Applications for Aging Well“, organized by Daniela Krainer, Maria Fellner, Cornelia Schneider and Markus Garschall, in cooperation with the Innovation Platform AAL Austria, addressed existing solutions, best practices and future challenges in this research application areas. Solutions and results of thematically relevant AAL pilot regions in the context of dementia (by Lucas Paletta), tele-coaching for active lifestyle (by Verena Venek) and the integration of a health care center model within the Carinthian pilot region Smart VitAALity (by Daniela Krainer) as well as an inspiring insight into the possibilities of Mixed Reality in this context (by Cornelia Schneider) have been presented.
More information on relevant societal challenges, European initiatives, and implications for using Tele-Applications for Aging Well is given in the session description. The Smart VitAALity presentation is also available here.
Among the participants in the AAL session, our cooperation partners Tarja Heinonen and Hanna-Greta Puurtinen from Tampere University, Finland attended the workshop. A lively exchange with our COOP4HEALTHCARE mentor Hanna-Greta on recent AAL and Active & Healthy Aging initiatives and approaches took place. This resulted in discussions on future cooperation activities, definite plans to visit Carinthia University of Applied Sciences and, we are pleased to announce that Tarja and Hanna-Greta will attend the Smart Living Forum at the Innovation Congress in Villach in November 2019 as speakers.
For further impressions head over to the official dHealth website.
