Networking for a digital Europe

Getting up at 4.15am on a Wednesday morning to go to a meeting in Amsterdam can make you wonder if you are doing the right things in life. But you're not so bad that you can't change your mind. To sum up the day: a very good meeting with many new faces and contacts to work with, to achieve together a Europe that makes the most of the opportunities of digitalization in health.

The purpose of my trip was to participate in a meeting organized by Microsoft, on the theme "Accelerating Cloud Adoption in Healthcare, Call to Action" with the aim of making politicians and decision-makers at European level better understand the importance of using cloud-based solutions in the health sector. Ultimately, the meeting also aimed to develop a call to action for the adoption of cloud services in the EU and the health sector.

One general conclusion I draw from the day is that many EU Member States have now started to develop digital strategies for healthcare, often based on the use of social media.

From Ireland, Richard Corbridge, CIO of the Health Service, presented, for example, how they have connected healthcare by applying cloud solutions and building a national portal. Corbridge described almost lyrically how they have developed 45,000 new digital identities and aim to give 10,000 healthcare workers access to digital solutions by the end of 2016. The fact that they also see their mission as facilitating and streamlining work processes by digitizing and giving employees the tools they want to improve for patients is gratifying.

At the meeting, I also met the CIO from the Norwegian Directorate of Health, Helge Blindheim, Peter Gille, CEO, Cambio, and Carmen La Plaza Santos who is Deputy Head of Unit DG Connect European Commission, i.e. responsible for getting the EU to agree on digitization.

Carmen La Plaza Santos described the importance the Commission attaches to both technical and semantic interoperability from a pan-European perspective. Concepts and standards must be pan-European. If Europe does not succeed in establishing common standards on which to build a future, there are obvious problems. The fact that the Commission is now actively pursuing these issues means that we, the IT and telecom companies, must also become even more involved.

The participation and networking alone is more than worth a very early morning!