Dr. Ilias Iakovidis, European Commission, Belgium
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 | Dr. Ilias Iakovidis
Responsible person for planning and monitoring of research in the area of
health telematics |
| Short CV | Ilias Iakovidis received Ph.D. in 1990 (USA) in applied mathematics thesis on inverse problem in electrocardiography. From 1990 to 1993 he was a researcher at University of Montreal and Montreal Heart Institute. In 1993 he joined European Commission where he currently serves duties of deputy Head of ICT for Health, responsible for research activities in eHealth and biomedical informatics. He is contributing to the successful follow up of the eHealth Communication and Action Plan COM (2004) 356 of which he was the main co-author. Beyond the office duties he continues to publish articles and books, teach graduate courses on medical informatics in EU and US, and giving keynote lectures at major international conferences. In 2001 he has been elected fellow of American College of Medical Informatics for his contribution to the field. |
| Title: | eHealth - Current situation and future prospects |
| Abstract | Does eHealth matter? Yes, the marriage of healthcare and information and communication technology makes perfect sense since healthcare is mainly about information handling and knowledge management. Here by eHealth we encompass the classical medical and health informatics as well as telemedicine and telecare. The eHealth solutions provide not only timely information to health professionals and patients, but enable the creation of citizen centred health delivery system. This new generation of system based on connectivity and shared care, when combined with proper organization and skills have proven to improve quality of care due to a knowledgeable provider, better support to disease prevention based on the informed patient, and better management and efficiency of health services due to available information on all levels. Several Member States have embarked towards large scale deployment of eHealth services. Some real life applications, type of European Commission support, and valuable lessons will be presented. What are the next research challenges and opportunities for eHealth? The convergence of IT-BIO and Nano- technologies has brought many opportunities for eHealth. The prevention and autonomy aspects can be improved with the so-called personal health systems - portable, wearable or implantable- that combined with new generation of biosensor and wireless communication give possibilities for monitoring of one's health status and prevent dangerous or unwanted situations. Example of biomedical clothing for cardiac patients will be discussed. The genomic based (molecular) medicine has the potential for personalization of care, early diagnosis and efficacy of treatments. Example of a grand challenge in this domain is that of multilevel modelling and simulation of human physiology and/or specific disease. Here the challenge is to integrate properly the information from the level of molecule, cell, tissue, organ and population, to model and simulate across these levels biological processes and evaluate the best potential treatment based on specific patient's data. European Commission is encouraging and supporting interdisciplinary research bringing together biomedical engineering, medical informatics and bioinformatics a well other areas in order to gain necessary knowledge and to invent new solutions for keeping everyone of us healthy as much as possible and to provide personalized and continuous health support for all in need. |
