Smart health
new challenges ahead

On 15 June and 16 June 2022, ITEA organised its 8th international customer workshop in Eindhoven and this year it focused on Smart health, an important challenge of ITEA. The workshop was co-organised with Atos, Barco, Esri Canada, NXP and Philips and luckily it was possible again to organise it as a physical workshop, with some of the customers joining remotely. The event gathered 16 end users of Smart health solutions representing the point of view of the customers and around 20 solutions providers - large companies, SMEs and research organisations – of the Smart health sector.

Smart health, a key challenge for ITEA

This event was the second Smart health customer workshop organised by ITEA, the first one being held in Berlin in June 2016. We decided to address the Smart health challenge once more for several reasons.

First, the health sector is a very important economic sector for Western countries. It represents close to 10% of GDP and its share in the economy is increasing. Compared to 50 years ago, when it represented around 5% of GDP, this is a tremendous growth and we hope that our economies will continue to produce enough wealth to sustain this rising trend.

Second, everyone is interested in the progress in the healthcare sector. We and our relatives are potential beneficiaries of any improvements that can be developed to provide better healthcare. There is a strong aspiration for new solutions that will be widely accessible.

Third, it is the right time to discuss how some technological evolutions can impact healthcare. We see that more and more new sensors are available and we have also progressed strongly in communication and endpoint devices with the development of smartphones and the related networks. This offers new opportunities for healthcare solutions. Artificial Intelligence is also an impactful technology for Smart health and has already been involved in this for several years, so we can assess the first lessons learnt from the use of AI in healthcare. The COVID-19 pandemic has also been a challenge for the healthcare industry and we can learn from this difficult experience to prepare future solutions.

For these different reasons, the choice of Smart health for the annual customer workshop was natural to ITEA. The Organisation Committee put in place to prepare the event (with the participation of Atos, Barco, Esri Canada, NXP and Philips) decided to select five topics to focus on in the workshop. This selection was made knowing that a two-day workshop would be unable to address the whole field of Smart health and that other topics such as new business models or drug discovery would require a different panel of participants. However, the selected topics already covered a large spectrum of research challenges for which software innovation can be a game changer.

The workshop focused on:

• Telehealth, remote interaction with patients/healthcare staff, patient monitoring at home, virtual care:
  How to benefit from new means of communication, sensors and virtual reality to interact with patients remotely? What are the challenges of delivering good care without the patient having to come to the hospital?
• Hospital optimisation: capacity monitoring, resource management, more patient-centric:
  What are the needs in hospitals and how can IT contribute to increasing the quality and productivity of caregivers at the hospital?
• Systems for digital pathology:
  How can pathology be improved thanks to new IT systems? In which areas could these technologies (data processing, robotics, advanced reality) better support current human activities? How to introduce these technologies to the benefit of patients and medical staff?
• Moving from care to prevention and more personalised healthcare:
  How can personal data (genomics, sensor data) help to prevent potential diseases and how to adapt care to each individual? What are the current barriers and challenges when moving in this direction?
• Data exploitation (with a good balance of ethical and privacy concerns):
  How to exploit the new data sources related to healthcare? What are the opportunities (for care, for research and for economical optimisation) and the challenges? How to limit the security and privacy risks?

The first two topics cover the different places where care is provided to patients. In both cases, software innovations can provide a means to either optimise existing processes or support new solutions. The third topic focuses on helping caregivers with their diagnostics. The fourth targets new solutions to develop a healthy lifestyle to prevent diseases. The last one is more transversal as data is everywhere and is therefore already central to the first four topics. It was selected to enable a discussion on generic problems related to data exploitation, such as data quality, data selection, privacy or upscaling.