The 1 and 2 February 2017 the fifth Artic Light E-health Conference is taking place in Luleå, Sweden. Top-level thought leaders, politicians, business innovators and e-health professionals will meet to discuss and develop tools to design better health and networking.
Two main themes of the Conference: the Digital Transformation of Healthcare and Health Equity in the Digital Age.
The Digital Transformation of Healthcare
Digital Transformation is the whole scale change to the foundational components of healthcare: from its operating model to the infrastructure, from the services provided, to who receives them. It touches every function of healthcare: workforce training, HR, finance, reimbursement and evaluation models, through operations, technology, communication and business development.
Healthcare is affected by all changes occurring in society, from patient behaviours to tech, commerce and service sectors. Understanding the key challenges may let better understand which strategy to take and the priorities and capabilities needed to manage the digital transformation.
The key challenges are:
- The level of maturity required for the health and social care system to adopt digital and integrated care solutions
- The barriers hindering wide scale uptake of technology enabled care
- The need to challenge the role of the health profession and reshape it for the digital transformation ahead.
Learning today how to build digital health eco-systems, innovative business models and accelerating the translation of ideas will help to catch up with the future transformations and build sustainable solutions.
The potential of digital healthcare lies in improving quality of care, boosting innovation, empowering patients and creating a sustainable healthcare system.
Health Equity in the Digital Age
The importance of dealing with Health Equity lies in the belief that everyone deserves a chance to lead a healthy life no matter the socio-economic status, demographic factors or the country of origin.
Digital health technologies can play an active role to reduce health disparities, improve health outcomes, and the potential of digital to improve access to high quality health information for vulnerable groups. How is the key question.
The key challenges of creating Health Equity are:
- Providing care in underserved communities with poor healthcare and digital infrastructures
- The barriers of low digital and health literacy for adoption of digital solutions among vulnerable groups
- How technology has improved or hindered the delivery of quality care.
Accelerating innovation by sharing data can improve healthcare. Understanding how digital strategies empower people will make possible reaching remote communities, helping to eliminate health disparities, developing solutions that are adapted for people’s different physical and cognitive abilities, addressing low digital health literacy among vulnerable groups.
The evolution of new health technologies promises a better and deeper insights into people care needs and also through healthy beahviour changes, accelerating health development.
At ALEC there is the opportunity to understand the value of digital health and gain fresh perspectives, learning and being inspired by the global thought leaders shaping the future of digital health.
Photo credit Diana Robinson @Flickr http://tinyurl.com/hkglmad
