Patient Safety Event Recap - better late than never!
I have been really slacking and not in just personal blogs but also in our recaps of the Health 2.0 Amsterdam events. I even missed one completely. I want to personally apologize to each and every one of you. I know that building a community is about communication so I appreciate your patience. I am also super excited that Hans Dijkstra joined us a few months back and have been now a key driver and contributor to this community! If you haven't done so already, please welcome Hans as a co-organizer!
Before I move into the summary, we have a request: – we have been asked numerous times by the members of this community to stream the events and while I feel that the real, in-person interactions, discussions, and feedback is what makes these meetups great, we also realize that everyone is very busy and would love to provide this as an option (mostly for later viewing). If you would like to volunteer (or know anyone who would) to be our streaming and recording guru it would be greatly appreciated. I realize that with the technology today this is a very easy task, but would love to have someone fully responsible for this portion of our meetup. What do you get: a satisfaction that over 500 members can be part of our community and contribute but also learn from the great presenters we have every month as well as from each other in the Q&A sessions.
As always, we try to combine the presenters into themes, however this one we had to stretch the definition. We gathered again at ACE Venture Lab (thank you Jeoren for graciously hosting us again) to talk about risk management and interoperability. Between the dynamic and passionate Serge Diekstra from iPatientSafety and Lies Van Gennip, CEO of Nictiz, who eloquently laid out the challenges ahead for interoperability, we had a blast and felt that the two presentations melded together very well (please give us your feedback as always)
I learn something from every meetup we host and while living here for 3 years with great familiarity of the healthcare system, some of the statistics presented by Lies, opened my eyes. While I will not go through the detailed recap (you can find the presentation here) I want to point out just a few things that struck me:
With the specialization of hospitals, interoperability becomes even more urgent with data on quality as well as transparency as key outputs – while this is nothing earth shattering , I wanted to call this out explicitly
While highly fragmented, the electronic data exchange percentages actually impressed me (especially GP) though I would question what “electronic “means? :)
The re-use of data is absolutely shameful and appalling. We really need to do more to open up the data to community and researchers.
Meaningful Use in Netherlands – this was a great discussion point and Lies pointed out that in Netherlands today there is no carrot nor the stick – does the government here have to step in to force MU-like policies modified for this market?
This MU discussion inspired the group to put on a debate which we will be hosting at Rockstart on November 26th. From a technology perspective there is absolutely no reason why this can not be done but we have vested interests in this industry, regulatory hurdles, closed systems and lack of incentives to make this work. But I will pause here and please look for the detailed agenda, but make sure you RSVP early!
Not sure where to start here but Serge delivered a thought provoking and energetic presentation. Please flip through it on Slideshare but the executive summary of what is similar across the two industries is well captured by “insidiousness of human error”. In US alone between 210K to 440K fatalities happen every year that could have been prevented.
Serge also used a quote from Joel Achenbach “You could think of it as dominoes falling, except it’s more brutal than that: The dominoes are all simultaneously crushed from above.” Joel was referring to the BP disaster in his book, but think about a patient being rushed into the emergency room with heart failure – really food for thought.
I am also honored that the iPatientSafety team is entrusting me to deliver their presentation at the upcoming Health 2.0 London on the second day of the event (November 11th, 10:45AM). Speaking of which - hope to see you there and you can use our special code for 25% off (AMS14)
Now for the upcoming events
National Health Big Data Challenge - (Nov 7 is application due date)
HIMSS Amsterdam - (Nov 6-7) , Amsterdam
Health 2.0 Europe - (Nov 10-12), London (use code AMS14 if you still want to register)
World Healthcare Forum - (Nov 30 - Dec 2), Den Haag
