IHE International hosted the IHE World Summit on September 11, 2017, in association with the HIMSS AsiaPac17 Conference at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre in Singapore. This marked the first time the World Summit has been held in Asia. The event featured keynote speakers and workshops dedicated to interoperability in healthcare. Among the many notable educational presentations, representatives from the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) shared the critical role IHE plays in their approach to driving interoperability forward. Participants in the World Summit came from 18 countries from around the world.
“The IHE World Summit presented the audience and participants with an excellent overview of the current adoption of IHE Profiles in the region and the opportunities to continue leveraging best available standards in achieving interoperability,” says Dr. Michael McCoy, co-chair of IHE International. “The goal for IHE, and for every entity adopting technology in the healthcare arena, is to improve the availability of usable clinical information, to enable the best choices to made in care delivery, whether by clinicians or individuals.”
Sixteen speakers from 13 different countries spoke during the World Summit. Dr. McCoy opened the event by speaking about IHE’s ongoing efforts advance standards-based interoperability efforts. Other speakers presented on topics ranging from health information exchanges to mHealth. In addition to IHE representatives, speakers included leaders of government agencies and eHealth organizations that use IHE profiles.
“As an organizer of the event, given the program my colleagues and I assembled, I was anticipating an exciting event,” said Jürgen Brandstätter, the event coordinator for the World Summit. “But I was overwhelmed by the amount of first-class information delivered by the speakers. It was exciting to listen to the different experiences and success stories out of the various countries and to learn that the Asian region has started to extensively implementing Health Information Exchanges almost everywhere.”
Feedback from the event’s speakers and attendees was overwhelmingly positive.
