Faces of Digital Health

Have you ever had the experience of not knowing how to decide about your medical condition? Or when you went to the doctor’s and haven’t asked half of the things you remembered might be useful to know when you returned home? Maybe you’re an app developer trying to figure out how to prevent churn and have a lasting user engagement with your health app? In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Talya Mir...

The field of healthcare digitalization is maturing and getting increasingly sophisticated, demanding healthcare and technology leaders to think more strategically than they were perhaps required a few years ago. Chief Innovation or Chief Digital Officers are moving more to the executive level, where they need to take into consideration not just which tech solutions are really good, but which make...

This is the last episode of Faces of digital health in 2021. Instead of an interview or a string of predictions for 2022, you will hear a reflection about the past year or two which I had with two other podcasters - Joy Rios - the host of HIT like a girl podcast - a podcast and a community supporting women in healthcare IT, and Bianca Rose Phillips - the host of Voice of Law podcast. Bianca is a d...

A lot has been done in the VR for healthcare space today, especially in the US. The therapeutic potential is undeniable. Over 5000 studies have shown the efficacy of VR for pain management, PTSD, eating disorders, mental health, even helping manage pain during childbirth. In 2020 the FDA gave VR ​​a special designation for virtual reality as a breakthrough device for managing pain. In November 202...

Claire Murigande is a Medical Affairs leader born in Burundi, lived in Kenya, and is now based in Switzerland. She is a biologist by background, passionate about empowering team members and bringing value through science. Among other things she recently completed an advance business degree in digital leadership and looked at the future development of digital health, where, as she says, being mindf...

Marylyn Harris, RN, MSN, MBA is a Cybersecurity Consultant, Speaker, Writer and Social Entrepreneur. Harris is a decorated (former) U.S. Army Nurse and Gulf War Veteran. She was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army in 1992 and pursued a Master’s degree in psychiatric mental health nursing. After working as a sales rep for pharmaceutical companies she dove into healthcare IT and has been immerse...

Marie is the CEO of the Centre for Digital Business. She is a writer, commentator and international speaker on artificial intelligence, digital transformation, cyber, technology, ethics and the human experience. Marie’s expertise is the human interface in complex servicing systems. She is the co-creator of Nadia, the first AI digital human for service delivery and the creator of the AI digital hum...

This is the last episode in a short series about healthcare digitalization in the Nordics. The discussion resolves around healthcare in the Nordics more broadly, data standards and interoperability across Europe, a successful pilot project from the 2000’s called epSOS, in which 12 EU Member states worked on cross-border healthcare interoperability, and what that project tells us about ambitions in...

Finland has well-established regulations and processes for the use of data for secondary purposes. This is overseen by the Social and Health Data Permit Authority Findata, which facilitates data permit processing and improves data protection for individuals. The secondary use of health data refers to using health data, such as patient records, for purposes other than the primary reason for which t...

This is the second episode about digital health in the Nordics. In the previous episode, you could listen about Denmark, how elderly care is managed there and how EHRs have been in place for years so clinicians and patients can access data digitally. In this episode, Nard Schreurs, a journalist by background who’s been working with e-health since 2007, and has both started and built up Healthworld...

This is the first out of four episodes about digital health and healthcare in the Nordics. In the next few weeks, you will hear about Denmark, Norway, Finland, and a broader regional overview. Not all countries but there have already been speakers on the show who also talked about Sweden, so I will link those in the show notes as well.  The first speaker you will hear from is Erik Jylling, the exe...

A few years ago Stefan Buttigieg, a digital health evangelist from Malta said that Malta is a great testbed for digital health startups interested in entering Europe (https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/2019/01/03/f027-can-malta-be-a-gateway-to-the-european-market?rq=Malta). In this episode, we’ll re-visit the island in a discussion with Ryan Grench - Radiology Registrar from Malta who works...

End of August Days of eHealth were organised as part of the Slovenian Presidency to the Council of EU. In four days a lot of insight was offered about healthcare digitalization in Catalonia, Germany, Portugal, Slovenia, Israel and Finland. In the previous episodes, I published the panel discussions about Germany and Catalonia. This is the panel about Israel.    Israel has had electronic healthcare...

From the 26th and 29th of October, I will be co-hosting the EPF Congress 2021, brought to you by the European Patients’ Forum. This year’s topic is the digital transformation of healthcare. Speakers from across Europe and organisations such as WHO, German Federal Ministry of Health, European Medicine’s Agency, EIT Health, BMJ and more are going to discuss the state of digitalization in Europe, wit...

Slovenia is currently presiding the council of EU until 2022. In the first week of September, the members of the Slovenian health tech ecosystem organized a conference about examples of good practices in healthcare digitalization across Europe. In one of the previous episodes, you were able to listen to the panel discussion on the healthcare strategy in Catalonia. Today’s episode is an adapted rec...

Nina Capital, is a specialized venture capital firm investing in early stage startups at the intersection of healthcare and technology. Level 20 is a not for profit organisation founded in 2015 by 12 women working in senior roles in private equity, aligned around a common vision of improving gender diversity in the industry. Nina Capital and Level 20 recently published a report that showed y. In a...

If we look at nationwide successful digitalization projects, we often hear about Estonia, Israel, Denmark, Finland, Slovenia, or Israel. All these countries have less than 10 million people. It is therefore not surprising, that in bigger countries that are divided into regions, successful digitalization happens gradually. Spain is divided in regions and each one of them manages healthcare on its o...

Taiwan spends only 6.4% of it’s GDP for healthcare, but has high satisfaction rates with healthcare, and is also very digitalized. In this episode, a closer look into healthcare in Taiwan is provided by Prof. Yu-Chuan Jack Li - a pioneer of artificial intelligence in medicine and translational biomedical informatics. Professor Li is Editor-in-Chief for BMJ Health & Care Informatics journal, the el...

After a summer of discussions about medication safety, medication errors, the role of AI in prescribing decision support, precision medicine, and drug development, we’re moving to explore healthcare systems again. Today, we’ll dive into Canada, more specifically Quebec. You will hear from two speakers: Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg - President and CEO Integrated Health and Social Services University Netw...

Dr. Marinka Žitnik is a computer scientist from Harvard, studying applied machine learning with a focus on challenges brought forward by data in science, medicine, and health. A large aspect of her work concerns the use of AI for better use of medications - either by analyzing and predicting side effects in polypharmacy or by potentially discovering new indications of combinations of drugs that ar...

According to WHO the occurrence of adverse events due to unsafe care is likely one of the 10 leading causes of death and disability in the world.  Patient harm is caused by several healthcare issues.  Healthcare-associated infections occur in 7 and 10 out of every 100 hospitalized patients in high-income countries and low- and middle-income countries respectively (11). Unsafe surgical care procedu...

Lea Dias is a former Medication Safety Pharmacist at Perth Children’s Hospital, now the Founder and CEO of Quaefacta. In 2013, the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust enabled her to go on a six-week tour around the world, to visit several hospitals in the US, UK, and Israel, and assess how various institutions used technologies for patient safety improvement. Three years later, she went on another to...

Some say fax machines still exist because of healthcare. Across the world, paper is still heavily used in healthcare. The NHS is on course to eliminate paper prescribing in hospitals and introduce digital prescribing across the entire NHS by 2024. From 2018 until the end of 2020, 216 NHS trusts have received funding to implement systems electronic prescriptions and medicines administration (ePMA)....

Do you know what clinical pharmacists do? For one thing, clinical pharmacists optimize patient’s medications. This can have a big impact on improving patient outcomes and patient quality of life. In today’s discussion, you’re going to hear from Dr. John Horn, Emeritus Professor of Pharmacy and Associate Director of the UW Medicine Pharmacy Services. He is co-author of the reference texts Drug Inte...

Being a doctor can be very gratifying when a life is saved or a patient is cured. However, the number of jobs and skills physicians need to master is increasing with the advancement of technology and science. This makes the medical environment increasingly stressful, also because at the moment, many IT solutions are burdensome and add the bureaucratic workload to the schedules of doctors. Today’s...