Leveraging the civil society dialogue on eHealth and Telemedicine EHTEL and EESC co-organise an eHealth Symposium in Brussels

Published: 10/12/2009

BRUSSELS, BE - (HealthTech Wire / News) - The European Health Telematics Association (EHTEL) and the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) jointly invite to the symposium "Joining for Visions of Person Centred Health" all interested stakeholders, i.e. policy makers, users, researchers, vendors and all other eHealth enthusiasts in Europe.

It came out as an obvious process for EESC to collaborate with EHTEL since both have one objective in common: establishing a forum for consultation, representation and information of the actors of the civil society. For EHTEL, the scope of this forum is about the deployment of eHealth and Telemedicine services while, for EESC, the scope is much broader and covers all issues relevant to the European Union.

For EHTEL, the symposium marks the Association’s 10th Anniversary and “A Decade of eHealth”. For EESC, the symposium marks the recent publication of the EESC Opinion TEN378 on the Commissions’ Communication COM(2008) 689 on telemedicine for the benefit of patients, healthcare systems and society. In this opinion, prepared by the section "Transport, Energy, Infrastructure and the Information Society", EESC welcomes the EC Communication, encourages Member States to integrate telemedicine into their health policies and supports this view by concrete recommendations. At the same time, EESC regrets that not enough attention is paid to the training of health professionals for telehealth services. It should be avoided to educate only some highly specialised "tele-doctors"; rather there should be a sound education of all health professionals in telemedicine.

Currently approx. 120 stakeholder representatives from all over Europe are expected to contribute to the organised civil society dialogue on eHealth and in particular on recent developments like high-level eHealth Governance, cross-border eHealth services, large-scale telemedicine applications and interoperability initiatives. Keynotes will review the parallel achievements both in healthcare and in eHealth over the last ten years and prepare healthcare visions (Moving eHealth beyond the “e”) for the future.

A panel “Pulse of the industry” will convene eHealth industry Thought Leaders and representatives of other eHealth stakeholder groups to debate about visions and latest trends.

On its second day, the CALLIOPE Open Session, titled “Cross-border eHealth Services in Europe: Putting Interoperability into Practice” will provide the first public opportunity to learn about achievements and progress in the establishment of a cross-border access to a patient and medication summary on a large scale basis. CALLIOPE is a European thematic network focusing on eHealth infrastructure interoperability, cf. www.calliope-network.eu.

This two-day conference will be held on 21-22 October 2009 at EESC (Jacques Delors Building), Brussels.

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Source: EHTEL