CLEF-eHealth-2012 Proceedings online

CLEFeHealth2012 – the CLEF 2012 Workshop on Cross-Language Evaluation of Methods, Applications, and Resources for eHealth Document Analysis

Hanna Suominen
NICTA, National ICT Australia and The Australian National University, Locked Bag 8001, 2601 Canberra, ACT, Australia

CLEFeHealth2012 is the CLEF2012 workshop on cross-language evaluation of methods, applications, and resources for eHealth document analysis, as defined by the World Health Organization as the transfer of health resources and healthcare by information and communication technologies (ICT). Its focus is on written and spoken natural-language processing with the use scenario of people using ICT tools to analyse and integrate eHealth documents across languages, genres, and jargons.

A public forum of all submitted papers is available from Forumatic.

Telemedicine Summit: Brussels

I’ve just finished up with the telemedicine summit by University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre (UPMC). The summit was relatively small but super engaged. A rare opportunity to meet up with the leading decision makers around Europe and UK (and US) to see how telemedicine is happening around the world.

It struck me that presentations at the workshop could be characteristed by the quote by Colonel William T. “Bill” Creech “There’s a war on between the people who are trying to do something and the people who are trying to keep them from doing something wrong.” There is an enormous amount of work going on in telehealth world-wide (that’s sort like saying there’s an enormous amount of water in the ocean) but much of it is still operating as a pilot- or research- project. I was asked to talk on what’s happening in telehealth in Australia, but decided to push those boundaries with the conclusions by offering up some advice on how Australia’s telehealth got to where it is. These were re-phrased by Prof. Dave Alverson Director of the Centre for Telehealth at the University of New Mexico:

• Just do it
• Leadership and Changemanagement
• It’s not that hard

Here’s some a few notes from some of the presentations

Mobile technology: Dan Drawbaugh

Dan Drawbaugh

Dan Drawbaugh, CIO of UPMC, showed how the analytics market is becoming fundamental to commercial success in the wider (ie. outside telemedicine) world, and the combination of fast innovation in consumer technology, cloud and big-data analysis and mobile technology could all push adoption of advanced telehealth care solutions.

Lessons from the UK

Stephen Johnson

Stephen Johnson on the Whole System Demonstrator project and Gerald Malone on the economic need for telemedicine
The Whole System Demonstrator project has shown a 45% reduction in mortality and a slight saving in cost even when considering the high cost of bespoke electronics (around £2000 per patient). It is running across three counties – each of which had very low socio-economic characteristics. The key message from Stephen was “don’t pilot your telemedicine system because we already did” The point being that the piloting of telemedicine is extremely expensive, and by now the world should be getting on with implementation.

Gerald Malone

Gerald Malone served as UK Minister for Health under John Major’s government. Gerald discussed the way that much of the health system’s economic view is “upside down” However, set up properly regions can be incentivized to align self-interest with innovation and further to drive new business (and not always looking for cost saving)

The take home message

There are thousands of active telehealth programs across the world. The big question is not whether telehealth is clinical efficacious, or economically beneficial: it is. The question is; how are we as a global community going to engage the world-wide telehealth activity to drive local adoption?