What the heck is HEC?
It is the annual conference of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) that teams up with the leading national organisations promoting Medical Informatics in the respective country it takes place. This year’s event came to Munich and was hosted by the Maximilian Ludwig University. Under the motto “Health-Exploring Complexity” (HEC), it stewards an “interdisciplinary system approach” to healthcare. Domain experts from five disciplines: Medical Informatics, Medial Biometry, Epidemiology and Health Data Management met to advance the dialogue between these segments. The ultimate aim of this meeting is to promote a deeper understanding of the healthcare field. As, CIC’s Principal Healthcare analyst, I visited the event which finished on Friday 2 September 2016.
Filled with a week of tutorials, workshops, panel discussions and poster sessions it has offered plenty of opportunities to mingle and exchange notes on the latest research as well as user experiences in the healthcare field. The main focus has been on work carried out around Europe, often benchmarked against experiences from the US.
CIC has learnt about advances in national digital healthcare strategies, research into how social media shapes new forms of interaction between patients and healthcare providers, which will form a key part of our research deliverables going forward. Crucially, HEC has offered glimpses of research into patients’ user experiences with care givers using IT and the role of paper in a seemingly paperless hospital. HEC’s insights as a forum to voice user experience would seem very relevant to suppliers of healthcare IT solutions and services. In case you were not aware of the event, you might like to take note of next year’s conference that will open its door in Manchester (http://informaticsforhealth.org/) in April 2017.
Check out CIC’s latest Healthcare Research reports below: