The conference 'The hospital of the future' started Monday morning in the Vrijhof with a lesson in perspective for the 120 participants from 18 countries, who were on campus Monday and Tuesday occupied by the applications of ICT in all parts of health care. Dr. Salah Mandil, director-advisor health informatics and telematics of the WHO in Geneva was the keynote speaker of the opening session.
Mandil presented to the conference attendants a number of examples showing that in lesser industrialised and in developing countries there are also a large number of possibilities for ICT-applications in health care. Even with less advanced methods enormous improvements can be made:
'Ethiopia has five radiologists, who have to collect and assess medical data from 22 locations in the country. By making use of existing communication-infrastructure, and concentrating the data processing in three locations, their productivity has increased four-fold.'
With relatively limited ICT resources a social and economic drama was averted in a part of Western Africa. In the basin of the river Volta the bulk of the population threatened to leave out of fear of being affected by 'river-blindness', caused by larvae in the Volta-water. By placing sensors in the river, which can send their data via satellite to a groundstation, the larvae could be traced exactly and fought directly.
In Mexico sixteen rural hospitals received a satellite connection to a large hospital in Mexico City, which decreased patient-movement between the different hospitals by 70 percent. In South Africa telemedicine has taken off in a big way since 1995: by making ICT-connections between hospitals at a great distance from each other, phenomena like teleconsults, telepathology and teleradiology have become reasonably established.
After the plenary session the conference attendants flocked to sixteen parallel-sessions spread over two days. The Faculty T&M (Department of Health Care and Management) acted as the organiser and host of the first conference in this set-up. To arrange the second conference, next year, it is the turn of the Stuart Graduate School of Business in the USA.
