European Commission publishes reports from SemanticHEALTH project and Robotics in Healthcare study

Published: 02/02/2009

BRUSSELS, BE – (HealthTech Wire / News) – The European Commission’s ICT for Health unit has released a report from the SemanticHEALTH project that outlines a research and deployment roadmap for semantically interoperable electronic health records (EHRs) in Europe. It can be downloaded here.

The report identifies key actions for a more “consistent representation of clinical meaning across European and global health systems”. It is intended to provide guidelines for the European Union’s Member States, their healthcare providers, industry and research communities, to take concrete action towards realising semantic interoperability and thus reaping the benefits of wide-scale eHealth adoption.

The report mentions specific technologies that can help drive semantic interoperability, including statistical text and web mining technologies, decision support tools, cross-language search engines and tools that help to directly encode free text into formal vocabularies and standardised terminologies, such as voice recognition.

In the foreword to the report, Ilias Iakovidis, Deputy Head of Unit ICT for Health, European Commission, DG Information Society and Media, demands that all those who are entitled to use EHR systems must be ensured to get timely and secure access to these systems. The information contained in EHRs must be up-to-date, accurate and, in the context of communication with another location, system or language, it should be correctly understood. Mr. Iakovidis further notes that interoperability “a long-term endeavour requiring both permanent structures and the organisation of processes for consensus-building and co-operation among all actors involved.”

The SemanticHEALTH roadmap should now help to structure the work required for many years to come.

Robotics in Healthcare 

The European Commission has also released a report from the Robotics for Healthcare study. This report investigates and develops a roadmap for the application of robotics in medicine and healthcare. The report and a related leaflet can be downloaded here:

• Robotics in Healthcare report
• Robotics in Healthcare leaflet

This news story has been published in the European Commission’s GoDirect channel on HealthTech Wire at www.healthtechwire.com/ictforhealth.