Healthcare of the Future 2022

Digital health – From vision to best practice!

International Conference Biel/Bienne

20 May 2022

We are in the aftermath of a pandemic that triggered considerable advances in the digital tools supporting healthcare. Contact tracing apps supported the work of healthcare professionals while other apps collected symptoms to learn more about the disease and its development. Modern IT-based solutions scanning the web with bot technology for news about COVID cases, such as the COVID-19 Dashboard of the Johns Hopkins University,(https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6.) initially delivered faster and better data than many national health authorities, who underestimated the efforts for collecting such data at the beginning of the pandemic.

We have also witnessed public authorities that were overwhelmed by the piles of infection reports sent on paper from GPs and hospitals using ordinary fax machines; authorities sometimes estimated the number of newly infected patients by weighing the incoming paper reports on a set of digital scales to deal with the data.

Each of us has attended many digital meetings using digital tools, and we were lucky that these tools were able to scale up to the sudden need and enable some continuity in communication when no one was allowed to travel or even leave the house. But we also experienced the fact that the tools can only partially replace personal contact and face-to-face discussions, which were not possible for considerable time spans. Now, in the transition back to normality, we are glad to invite you to the 2nd conference on the “Healthcare of the Future”. Our goal is to enable networking and exchange among researchers, thus we had to delay the conference for a year due to the pandemic. We will be one of the first medical informatics conferences in 2022 to once again permit personal attendance.

In the first edition of “Healthcare of the Future” in 2019, we tried to forecast digitised healthcare in the year 2030. We foresaw a further increased life expectancy (now to be questioned) and an improved, self-determined life at home with the use of intelligent systems, wearable devices and telemedicine services. We defined digital workflows for our elderly Swiss lady, Elisabeth Brönnimann-Bertholet, who suffers from diabetes and hypertension. An integrated cross-institutional clinical pathway was drawn up for her progredient hip arthrosis, which required surgery and a total hip endoprosthesis. We imagined a link between the patient at home, the GP, the specialist, the hospital and the rehabilitation centre by digital means.

In the pandemic however, we were forced to the realisation that the mix of infectious and healthy patients alone can be enough to put a modern hospital completely out of operation [1]. On the other hand, we also observed the use of modern robot technology for telepresence and physical distancing. It was even demonstrated that pre-diagnosis in public places using temperature checks and questionnaires could be performed by robots [2].

In 2019, we talked about personalised medicine. Now we have witnessed the development and worldwide availability of efficient vaccinations based on mRNA technology in record time, including the necessary clinical trials [3].

The first edition of the conference was held as part of the multi-stakeholder research project “Hospital of the future live” which had the goal of defining use cases for cross-sectoral treatment [4]. In its 2nd edition, we are just at the start of a novel competence centre ´nHospital@Home˙z at the Institute for Medical Informatics of the BFH. This competence centre aims to examine if and what kinds of current inpatient treatment could be realised in the patient’s home, and whether it is possible to integrate outpatient services to realise an improved care process. Thus, interoperability between the professional stakeholders in healthcare, and increasingly also with the patient, is an emerging topic.

This is the setting for the 2022 edition of “Healthcare of the Future”. The first conference had the goal of turning parts of the described visionary scenario into a tangible reality, with examples realised in our laboratory environment. In 2022, we will see which visions of the “Hospital of the future” have turned into reality and how digital interaction between nurses, caregivers, patients and healthcare institutions is to be realised.

The ultimate goal remains the same: improving and accelerating healthcare processes. Our three keynotes well reflect this by addressing key topics in medical informatics: interoperability, data quality and artificial intelligence (AI) with its ethical implications.

∙ “Transforming the healthcare ecosystem towards better interoperability” by Silvia Thun.

∙ “Data quality – What do we want, what do we need, what can we pay for?” by Rainer Röhrig

∙ “Ethical implications of AI usage in healthcare” by Tanja Krones

The conference comprises two tracks: main track and young researchers’ track. The four scientific sessions deal with the topics:

∙ Advancing Interoperability

∙ Semantic Interoperability

∙ Medical Informatics for Medical Research

∙ Evaluation of IT Influence

The young researchers’ sessions will focus on apps to support patients and healthcare professionals, applications in research in medicine and medical informatics and methods and strategies for workflow-based support in patient care.

Biel/Bienne April 4th 2022

Thomas Bürkle, Kerstin Denecke, Jürgen Holm, Murat Sariyar and Michael Lehmann

Bern University of Applied Sciences, Biel, Switzerland

References

[1] M. Nacoti, A. Ciocca, A. Giupponi, P. Brambillascam F. Lussana, M. Pisano, G. Goisis, D. Bonacina, F. Fazzi, R. Naspro, L. Lonfghi, M. Cereda, C. Montaguti, At the Epicenter of the Covid-19 Pandemic and Humanitarian Crises in Italy: Changing Perspectives on Preparation and Mitigation. NEJM catalyst innovations in Care delivery March (2020) 1–5. DOI: 10:1056

[2] L. Aymerich-Franch, I. Ferrer (2020). The implementation of social robots during the COVID-19 pandemic. ArXiv preprint. ArXiv:2007.03941

[3] E. Checcucci, F. Piramide, A. Pecoraro, D. Amparore, R. Campi, C. Fiori, O. Elhage, P. Kotecha, A. Vyakarnam, S. Serni, P. Dasgupta, F. Porpiglia, The vaccine journey for COVID-19: a comprehensive systematic review of current clinical trials in humans. Panminerva Med. 2022 Mar;64(1):72–79

[4] T. Bürkle, K. Denecke, M. Lehmann, E. Zetz, J. Holm, Integrated Care Processes Designed for the Future Healthcare System. Stud Health Technol Inform 245 (2017), 20–24.