Opening e-Health 2022
Shelagh Maloney (Executive Vice President Engagement and Marketing Canada Health Infoway) opened the eHealth Virtual conference and tradeshow 2022 and welcomed all the guests and speakers. She reported that it was crucial that the eHealth conference include patients, families and caregiver voices as part of the conference so that attendees could listen to their perspectives and that innovation would be informed by this input.
Stephen O’Reilley (Executive Director Federal relations Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI)) in his opening remarks noted that the pandemic had led to an increase in the interest in the health data. He noted that this data could be leveraged to improve healthcare in rural 1st nations and that organisations could work together such as digital health and CIHI to improve outcomes
Mark Casselman (CEO Digital Health) noted that the conference would bring the community together to celebrate achievements in digital health over the past year. He noted that work was critical to delivery of healthcare services and that the key areas noted for innovation of IT in healthcare included acceleration of data sharing, a shifting focus to increase patient care at home and in the community, cyber security, mental health and digital mental health solutions. However, he also noted that there was still a digital divide that had an impact on health equity in healthcare.
OPENING KEYNOTE: INNOVATION IN HEALTHCARE – A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Speaker: Dr Rowland Illing (Director and Chief Medical Officer, International Public Sector Health at Amazon Web Services (AWS))
“We are living through a time of great disruption and with great disruption comes great promise.”
Dr Rowland Illing
Dr. Illing said that the pandemic “turbocharged” the move to digital especially in healthcare and reported that AWS is being used by the healthcare organizations to enable security, scalability value ,and democratization of services. The added benefits of cloud technology is that systems are always available, require less than six minutes of downtime per year, can be scaled up or down, and allow for cost savings.
Dr Illing mentioned a few Canadian organisations leveraging cloud technology for their innovations: Weltel Health in British Columbia for example, uses chat boxes to provide medical services in a community with limited internet. Globally, cloud based technology is being harnessed for population health measures such as genomics(biobank UK), mission workloads such as EMRs, education that includes imaging, and healthcare analytics and innovation.
Through their academy, AWS provides analytics training and workshops.
Finally, for the people who are unsure about where to start concerning access to cloud based technologies, Dr. Illing recommended that they focus on the question they are trying to answer and then reach out for help as there is a lot of support to enable organizations to achieve their set goals.
