Table of Contents
1. e-Health Definition (jump)
2. What is e-Health Symposium 2013 (jump)
3. Dr. Christopher Larsen (jump)
4. What's Being Focused in e-Health Symposium 2013 (jump)
5. Problems Faced By Healthcare Providers in Low Development Countries (LDCs) (jump)
5.1. Least Concern of Frontier Markets (jump)
5.2. The Use of “Silo” Style in Managing Database (jump)
5.3 Vertical Programmes (jump)
6. e-Health as a solution (jump)
6.1. Strategies for Enhancement of Healthcare Services in LDCs (jump)
6.2. Community Based and Integrated Team Approach (jump)
6.3. Public Expansions (jump)
6.4. Embracing Eco-Friendly Alternatives (jump)
6.5. Why Free Open Source Software (FOSS) is a Good Alternative? (jump)
6.5.1. OpenMRS (jump)
6.5.2. GNUmed (jump)
6.5.3. FreeMED (jump)
7. Conclusions (jump)
1. e-Health Definition
The e-Health term means a practice of medical healthcare that is supported by electronic devices, communications or the Information Technology (IT) itself.
In this new millennium, the word "e" is used in most of today's services like email, e-Banking, e-coupons etc. The use of electronic services will involve Servers - the service provider, software and hardware.
(top)
2. What is e-Health Symposium 2013
The eHealth Symposium 2013 is geared by CIGMA (Centre for Information Governance, Management, and Audit) and Department of Information Systems (IS), College of Information Technology (COIT), and Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Malaysia. The symposium is intended to bring together the enormously varied community of researchers with an interest in ehealth to showcase their work, and exchange expertise, interests and ideas, with a view to establishing future collaborations and strengthening the eHealth research area.
The programme has included different keynote sessions by three distinguished keynote speakers from the international and national healthcare organizations. This will be followed by paper presentations by participants. We have chosen to attend one by Dr Chris. Larsen.
(top)
3. Dr.Christopher Larsen
June 26th, University Tenaga Nasional held it’s first ever e-health symposium at the College of IT. Uniten hosted 4 Key-note speakers form well know in both iT and Medical field of research. Uniten was very lucky to get one well known speaker from German , Dr. Christoph H. Larsen. Dr. Christoph H. Larsen or better yet know as Dr. Chris Larsen is a medical doctor, trained in Germany, United Kingdom and Australia, with specialisations in Tropical Medicine and Public Health from the UK and Australia.With a Masters degree in Molecular Biology of Infectious Diseases from the UK.
For the past 22 years, Chris has worked as medical practitioner, programme manager and advisor for quality assurance and health facility management in resource-limited settings in Afghanistan, Barbados, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Uganda and Vietnam. In 2003/4, he established the first truly affordable East African CD4 T cell enumeration facility for AIDS treatment monitoring in Uganda, and has been promoting affordable HIV-related diagnostics throughout Africa and the Caribbean through positions with private industry, NGOs, bilateral and international donors, and international scientific working groups.
At the same time, he remains highly active in rural and remote medicine and infectious diseases, clinical staff development and total quality management, with a special interest in health facility management, laboratory services and appropriate e-health. In 2005, Chris founded synaLinQ, a consulting firm to assist those in need of truly sustainable, practical solutions in health system strengthening; intermediate energy, water, sanitation and waste management technology; and related information and communication technology.
(top)
4. What's being focused in e-Health Symposium 2013
These are the mentioned by Dr. Chris during his speech about e-Health:
- Community based integrated team approach
- Essential components
- Desired specifications
- External sensors
- Wearable sensors
- Privacy concerns
- Precarious power supplies
- Demanding environmental factors
- Human Factors
- Corporate and frontier markets
- Donor coordination and data silos
- Strategies for Least Developed Countries (LDCs)
- Free Open Source Software (FOSS) success factors
- Robust resource efficient hardware (fan-less servers)
- Usability - managing electronic medical records (EMRs)
(top)
5. Problems Faced By Healthcare Providers in Low Development Countries (LDCs)
5.1. Least concern of frontier markets
Frontier markets is the less advanced capital markets from the developing world. Frontier markets are countries with investable stock markets that are less established than those in the emerging markets. They are also known as "pre-emerging markets". LDCs is the most badly affected because of less attention, minimal training, poor understanding of challenges, and failure as self-fulfilling prophecies.
The frontier, or pre-emerging, equity markets are pursued by investors seeking potentially high returns who are able to accept the higher risks these type of markets would be exposed to. Some of the risks investors face in these frontier markets are political instability, poor liquidity, inadequate regulation, substandard financial reporting and large currency fluctuation. In addition, many markets are overly dependent on volatile commodities.
Frontier market investments can have a low correlation to developed markets and thus can provide additional diversification to an equity portfolio. Giving more attention to frontier markets for the sake of the community especially the one in LDCs.
(top)
5.2. The use of “silo” style in managing database
A data silo is a repository of fixed data that an organization does not regularly use in its day-to-day operation. So-called siloed data cannot exchange content with other systems in the organization. The expressions "data silo" and "siloed data" arise from the inherent isolation of the information. The data in a silo remains sealed off from the rest of the organization, like grain in a farm silo is closed off from the outside elements. "Siloing" data will also limit the connection and collaboration to other foundation, and thus will slow down Healthcare movement.
Since the LDCs is least concerned, the innovation of information management is stunted.
(top)
Vertical initiatives can certainly be effective in tackling a particular medical problem, but their overall effect on the health of poor people has in recent years been questioned.
Some people argue that vertical initiatives risk diverting attention from, or even undermining, broader health systems established to prevent and treat all forms of poor health. It is argued they do this by creating unsustainable demands on the health workforce, wage distortions and dramatic escalation in recurrent costs (for antiretroviral drugs for HIV, for instance) that can be met only with external funds.
The slow progress on tackling some of the key targets of the Millennium Development Goals, such as on maternal and child mortality, which rely on a strong overall health system, has been partly blamed on this focus on vertical initiatives. With so much attention lavished on ‘vertical’ initiatives, ‘horizontal’ national health systems have too often been treated as the poor relation.
There can also be instances where people using health services have to make several visits to use different services, depending on whether they are run as part of a disease-specific programme or as an integrated part of national health services. Sometimes only part of the care they need may be available. A commonly quoted example is someone who may be receiving antiretroviral drugs, but who is unable to get treatment for opportunistic infections.
(top)
6. e-Health as a Solution
6.1 Strategies for Enhancement of Healthcare Services in LDCs
Concerns of the e-Health:
The concern of having every patients information in the system is privacy concern. Medical confidentiality and safeguarding patient's right will be more difficult. Some of the main problem is Data encryption, control of data access and warrantless surveillance (that is currently happening in the USA). In some county electricity is power and in most third world countries they have precarious power supplies. With blackouts/increasingly prolonged, dropouts, transients, poor grounding, voltage reductions and runaway costs of generator power are effecting the ICT growth.
Human factors can be both an advantage and disadvantage. Even with limited IT skills in most third world countries there are still yet hope because they are highly trainable and very committed, if given chance. on the down side they have a high risk of brain drain, limited knowledge sharing and patchy retention of skills.
There is several strategies to enhance healthcare services in LDCs:
- Work smarter not harder
- Provide equable geographical access to quality care
- Establish secure, unified, efficient data handling (ERP, HMIS, LIMS, HIS)
- Consider Private Not For Profit (PNFP) sector as innovator
- Favour free and open source software (FOSS)
(top)
6.2 Community Based and Integrated Team Approach
Usually community refers to a group of people living in a common geographical location. This group of people obeys some social norms and some common value among themselves. In this case, community based and integrated team approach means we improve relationship with customers and also fellow team mates for the best result, Community health, a field of public health, is a discipline which concerns itself with the study and improvement of the health characteristics of biological communities.
While the term community can be broadly defined, a community in term of healthcare tends to focus on geographical areas especially the LDCs rather than people with shared characteristics. The health characteristics of a community are often examined using geographic information system (GIS) software and public health datasets. Sharing patient records made easy as InfoShare or GEOPROJ combine GIS with existing datasets, allowing the general public to examine the characteristics of any given community in participating countries.
(top)
The size of the community is expanding rapidly, now Information System is needed more than ever to keep up with all the patients records .Transparent development processes is key to make sure the development does not effect the wellbeing of the public.Instead of having to rely on proprietary company to supply the software we should push more toward FOSS (Free Open Source Software) where the software is free, efficient and allow to get the community support free training materialAccording to Dr.Larsen he suggested we rely on linux/BSD softwares and system. This is because linux/BSD are very stable operating system,it has a build in layered security, it is slim and trim and the linux/BSD has thousands of free apps.
(top)
6.4 Embracing Eco-Friendly Alternatives
Dr. Larsen also discussed on the robust resource efficient hardware’s (fan-less servers), this allow the server to be more energy efficient (processors, drive tech). The fan-less design is able to stop the most common enemy faced by computer hardware ,dust .By having a dust-proof design it allows the hardware to have a longer time span and also help in reducing The cost of ownership (TCO). Dr.Larsen also mention on re-invented the solar energy because the old one is heavy and costly. This new solar technology allow for new technology such as the battery-less solar systems. This will also improve on energy efficient of the hardware ,extended it’s daytime use and low maintence costs
(top)
6.5 Why Free Open Source Software (FOSS) is a Good Alternative?
FOSS is a very good alternative to proprietary because there's no vendor lock-in, because there's no vendor. There are no hidden costs or upgrade scripts. Everyone will always be able to upgrade to the latest version for free. FOSS can give a good impact on Healthcare services as it minimizes the cost, giving them freedom to study, use, modify and re-distribute it for the use of the organization.
(top)
Some good and notable FOSS software for healthcare services:
OpenMRS is a collaborative open source project to develop software to support the delivery of health care in developing countries. It grew out of the critical need to scale up the treatment of HIV in Africa but from the start was conceived as a general purpose electronic medical record system that could support the full range of medical treatments. The first ideas and prototype of OpenMRS were conceived by Paul Biondich and Burke Mamlin from the Regenstrief Institute, Indiana on a visit to the AMPATH project in Eldoret, Kenya in February 2004.
The system is designed to be usable in very resource poor environments and can be modified with the addition of new data items, forms and reports without programming. It is intended as a platform that many organizations can adopt and modify avoiding the need to develop a system from scratch.
The software is licensed under the "OpenMRS Public License", based on the Mozilla Public License. It requires that recipients are entitled to freely access the source code, but allows binary distribution, modification of the code (under the same license) and bundling into larger products that are under different licenses.
(top)
GNUmed is a Free/Libre electronic medical record (EMR) for Unix-like systems (BSD, GNU/Linux, and UNIX systems), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and other platforms. GNUmed aims to provide medical software that respects the privacy of patients and that is based on open standards.
The GNUmed practice management is developed and maintained by a community of developers.
(top)
FreeMED is a web based open source electronic medical record system based on Linux, Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and PHP (commonly referred to as LAMP or LAMPS, a web server application to handle all web operations).
(top)
7. Conclusions
In the past ten years, the focus among academics and policy makers has been on introducing competition to the acute sector. However, the potential for competition to drive real improvements in out-of-hospital care has been neglected. We believe that it is time for health systems to shift their focus toward unleashing competition in primary care; that is where competition is likely to make the greatest difference.
Together we take part in improving the healthcare services, especially we as an IT student. We can make use of the knowledge we have in IT to help improve "digitized" operations of healthcare as well as to collaborate with the community to come out with a splendid healthcare solution in IT.
(top)
No comments:
Post a Comment