• Home
  • AER Elections 2025 – Shape the Future of Our Network
    • Call for amendments – AER Political Priorities 2025-2030
  • About
    • Governance & Structure
      • AER Procedures
      • The AER Executive Board
      • The AER Secretariat
    • AER stands with Ukraine
    • The History of AER
  • Members
    • Who are AER’s members?
    • Member Directory
    • Join AER!
  • Mutual Learning
    • About Mutual Learning
    • Knowledge Transfer Events
    • Working Groups
      • Ongoing Working Groups
      • Past Working Groups
  • Advocacy
    • About Our Advocacy Work
    • The Bureau
    • The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
    • AER Political Priorities 2020-2025
  • Projects
    • About Our Projects
    • Ongoing Projects
    • Look for Partners
    • Completed Projects
  • AER Programmes
    • Eurodyssey – A traineeship mobility programme for young people, entirely managed at regional level
    • Intercultural Regions Network
    • AER SUMMER ACADEMY
    • AER Youth Regional Network (YRN)
  • Events
    • AER Event Calendar
    • AER events
    • Other events

Assembly of European Regions

Connecting regions, inspiring Europe since 1985

You are here: Home / News / ALEC 2017: accelerating Digital Health

ALEC 2017: accelerating Digital Health

27 January, 2017 By Editor

Facebooktwitterlinkedinmail
Share this!

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

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Follow AER!
Facebooktwitterlinkedinrss

Filed Under: News, Policies Tagged With: Arctic, E-Health, Education & Training, Event 2017 ALEC, Financing regional healthcare, Health, Health inequalities, Healthcare, Innovation, Training

← Quality networking starts here Clean Energy for all Europeans: Call for applications →

More articles on this topic

Committee 2 Progress Report Spring 2018
ALEC: a success story
What can the Investment Plan for Europe do for health?
Norrbotten: Arctic Light e-Health Conference, 1-2 February 2017
Future Cohesion Policy & Health

AER. Connecting regions, inspiring Europe since 1985.

Follow our newsletter!




View previous campaigns.


  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

2025 AER General Assembly

  • Call for amendments - AER Political Priorities 2025-2030
  • AER Elections 2025

AER Projects

  • Ongoing projects
    • EU-BELONG: An Intercultural Approach to Migrant Integration in Europe’s Regions
    • MEET: Mobilise Europe = Engage Together
    • CL-YE | Climbing the Ladder: Fostering a Culture of Youth Engagement
  • Partner search

Library

Statutory Documents
AER Strategies
Minutes
Media Kit
Activity Reports
Newsletters
European Regions Map

Join AER!

Become a Member

Job Opportunities

Sign up for our Newsletter

Website map

Brussels · Strasbourg · Alba Iulia

A Network, a Partner and a Voice of European regions, since 1985 · Copyright © 2025 · Assembly of European Regions · [email protected] · Log in