Interview: Prof. Dr. Bernhard Breil on trends in healthcare IT and how you can prepare for it

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Which trends are most important in health IT and how can IT managers and doctors deal with them? We have Prof. Dr. Bernhard Breil, Professor of Health Informatics and System Integration at the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, was interviewed.

Which innovative healthcare IT trends do you think will be most important in the foreseeable future?

An important trend will be the integration of smartphones and smart wearables into (clinical) everyday life. A lot has been tried out in this area and in the innovation cycle, health apps are slowly reaching the plateau of productivity. In this context, the connection of patients to the digital healthcare system (keyword: Consumer Health Informatics) should also be mentioned. Citizens want to participate actively, manage their health and not be out of the picture when it comes to networking the players. Health apps can provide low-threshold access here. In addition, it is important to further advance the networking of the players in the healthcare system without giving up the data sovereignty of the respective locations (in particular clinics).

And for which specific application scenarios of these trends do you see the most potential??

Due to the low development barriers for health apps, it is possible here to distribute software in the form of an app that reaches many people in the background without a large corporation. The project funded by the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) CHARISMHA gives a detailed overview of the opportunities and risks of health apps that shed light on the potential of this market. In the law for secure digital communication and applications in the healthcare sector (eHealth law), gematik was also commissioned to examine the extent to which smartphones can help insured persons to maintain access rights to communications in the healthcare sector. The networking of the locations is currently due to a large BMBF funding initiative "Medical Informatics" in which strongly networked centers are to be promoted. This creates the potential to implement concrete application scenarios.

What is the interaction between these individual technologies?

Many of the technologies only develop their full benefits when several systems interact. This requires the consistent use of standards. The eHealth Act, for example, plans an interoperability directory that makes the standards used by the various IT systems in healthcare transparent. If properly smart health connected, smartphones can provide access to healthcare. The exchange of data for research purposes requires a functioning anonymization of the medical data.

What opportunities, but also risks, do these trends offer?

Many of the trends offer the opportunity to involve patients (or citizens) more actively in the healthcare system. Health apps are the entry into the digital health system. Such trends offer young or new companies in particular the opportunity to intervene in a market that has so far been dominated by large players, since app development is possible with comparatively little effort. The networking of the clinics helps in particular to understand rare diseases, which can then be analyzed in large numbers across institutions. Secure, electronic communication of medical reports and (image) findings has the potential to speed up processes and avoid duplicate documentation (and thus save time). On the other hand, there are also risks that data protection requirements are not complied with or that the quickly developed programs and apps contain content or technical errors. Networking increases the risk of falling victim to an attack with viruses or Trojans. The devastating consequences have been observed several times this year in hospitals.

And how can doctors and IT managers prepare for this?

It is clear that successful networking requires close cooperation between all those involved. In addition to the technical requirements relating to the compatibility of the systems, IT managers should above all keep an eye on the users who will later work with these programs. Doctors, as experts, contribute their knowledge and process experience to enable valuable products.

What content do you teach about this in your eHealth courses?

We focus heavily on interface skills. In our eHealth course, students receive a comprehensive insight into the medical basics, elementary skills in business administration and the necessary IT knowledge in programming, databases, interoperability and system integration. All of this is combined with practical projects and project studies that are carried out by companies in the healthcare industry. This means that our graduates can translate and mediate at the important interface between business administration, medicine and IT.

The interview was also published in the Radiology Forum: Read magazine >>

Cover picture: © flaticon.com / Freepik; Dave Gandy

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