WORLD HEALTH SUMMIT 2010 NEWSLETTER, NO. 7

Berlin, September 21, 2010

World Health Summit – Personalities

Matt Berg

Director of ICT for Millennium Villages Project, Earth Institute at Columbia University, USA

Matt Berg was named one of the 100 most influential people 2010 by Time Magazine.

He was born in 1978 in a small village of Cameroon and grew up in Senegal. He graduated with honours from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois in 2000. Matt Berg has an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management. Matt is a director at the Earth Institute at Columbia University responsible for the design and implementation of technology for the Millennium Villages Project, a project working with communities in 10 sub-Saharan Africa countries. He is a key leader in the work to improve health care for hundreds of thousands of people in Africa using the most ubiquitous communication device in modern history – the mobile phone.

Berg heads the development of  ChildCount+ , a community platform aimed at improving child and maternal health.  The project helps to reduce preventable diseases in the poorest villages of Africa through continuous monitoring, and it is grounded in a network of health workers that partner to improve health and nutrition in impoverished areas.

He is now scaling up ChildCount+ to monitor over 100,000 pregnant mothers and children under five.

Prior to joining ChildCount+, Berg helped to build the Rural Technology Lab in Mali that provides programming training to local students.

Matt Berg will speak in the Working Session “Universal Access to Health: Innovation in Infrastructure-Poor Settings” about “Mobile’s Potential to Scale Health Access“

Sessions at the World Health Summit

Working Session “Information Technology: New Horizons in Health Care”

What about tomorrow?

Many governments and other political players are currently facing the same questions: How should we best invest in IT to improve healthcare? Which strategies work and which do not? What do we need in order to get started?

In addition to the role of technology in innovative provision, IT is now a significant contributor to healthcare systems, as it provides a key enabler for understanding the health needs of the population as well as of connecting payers and providers.

While it is commonly accepted that IT plays an important role in improving healthcare efficiency and effectiveness, there are many past examples of costly – but failed – IT projects.

Although many previous IT programs in healthcare have failed to deliver better health outcomes or lower costs, there are significant potential benefits from well-designed and well thought-out IT programs.

• Do current systems capture enough sufficient data and information to identify and address emerging healthcare trends? And how do we best consider patient privacy and information security?
• What is the role of IT in developing public and international health policy?
• What is the role of information management and analytics in enhancing health management, improve quality and decrease costs?

The Working Session, co-chaired by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the American Medical Informatics Association, is taking up these and other questions raised with the public, private and non-profit sectors.

Amongst the confirmed speakers of this session are:

• Balazs Szathmary | Senior Director, Global Strategy & Operations Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry Business Unit | Oracle | Germany
• Andreas Demetriades | Director General | Health Insurance Organization Cyprus | Cyprus
• Edward H. Shortliffe | President and CEO | American Medical Informatics Association | United States

The session will be chaired by:
Edward H. Shortliffe | President and CEO | American Medical Informatics Association | United States 

The Working Session takes place at October 12th, 2010, 10.30-12.30 in Session Room “Bier”.

World Health Summit Network

The M8 Alliance and its Members

The “M8 Alliance of Academies, Universities, and Health Centers” was officially inaugurated on October 14th, 2009, on the occasion of the 1st World Health Summit as a medical and scientific forum of excellence. It is composed of a network of prestigious medical institutions to deal with scientific, political, and economic issues related to medicine and public health, together with stakeholders from politics and industry at the national, European, and international levels. The World Health Summit will be the central platform of the M8 Alliance.

Johns Hopkins Hospitals, Medical School & University, Baltimore, USA - Breeding Ground for Top International Medics

Blue no more. Helen Taussig noticed it right after the operation. The little eleven-month old girl no longer had the blue (cyanotic) face colouring typical of her disease. This was the first successful surgery on a “blue baby,” a child with Tetralogy of Fallot. 29 November 1944 was a day of hope for countless children with a cyanotic heart defect. For Helen Taussig, the paediatric cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, aged 46 years at the time, it was a double triumph. Together with the surgeon, Alfred Blalock, she had designed the surgical procedure that was successfully used for the first time on the little patient: anastomosis of a branch of the sub-clavian artery (or common carotid artery) onto the pulmonary artery.

Helen Taussig’s triumph is one of the many milestones in medical history to come from the university hospital in Baltimore in the US State of Maryland that is named after a patron from the bygone golden age of the harbour town. The Johns Hopkins Hospital can look back on a staff list which reads like a “Who is Who” of the history of modern medicine, especially in the surgical fields. As well as 17 Nobel prize-winners to date, the Johns Hopkins Medical School, which commands a whole range of other clinical and experimental institutes in addition to its most important hospital, the John Hopkins Hospital, as well as a recently acquired dependency in Singapore, was the academic home of Harvey Cushing (1869–1939). Cushing was not only a pioneer of modern neurosurgery but also the person who discovered the disease characterized by elevated corticoid release that is named after him. It was also the home of William Osler, who left behind copious medical literature ranging from the serious, such as a clinical account of subacute bacterial endocarditis to the humorous like the very first description the penis captivus (purely fictional and published under a pseudonym). William Halsted (1852–1922) was also a professor at the Johns Hopkins. His biography sparkles with his many pioneering surgical deeds. One of his most significant achievements is the introduction of the surgical glove for antisepsis.

The Johns Hopkins Medical School endeavours to command a world-class faculty today as well, even though in salary negotiations with top-class scientists other bidders are often better equipped in terms of budget. So today, the university is happy to make its mark as a kind of breeding ground for top international medics, and many doctors have moved from Baltimore to head prestigious hospitals. In the case of the radiologist, Elias Zerhouni, it was to lead the politically highly influential National Institute of Health (NIH). After the change of president from Bush to Obama, Zerhouni returned to his former  place of work.

There can be no doubt that the Faculty of Medicine is the flagship of the Johns Hopkins University. It dates back to its endowment by business man and philanthropist John Hopkins, who died in 1873. Hopkins, who made a fortune as an investor in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, was a practising Quaker and an early campaigner for the liberation of slaves in slave-owning Maryland. There can be no doubt that model on which “his” university was to be built stood for the patron and name-giver: it was to be a classic German university modelled on the example set by Wilhelm von Humboldt.

At present, about 20,000 students attend the university, which is a very high number for a top American university of this calibre. Studying medicine at this alma mater comes at a price: the four-year residence (after a foundation course) at the Medical School and everything associated with it costs about 270,000 dollars at current rates. The long-term prospects make this investment in your education almost pain-free. A degree from the Johns Hopkins opens the doors to the best medical posts in the USA. The certificate displayed in your own consulting room is a good reason for generous professional fees. Despite the current crises and uncertainties within a public health system that is high on the political agenda despite being highly resistant to reform, the Johns Hopkins Hospital is definitely on an expansion course. In 2011, the new hospital extension, costing almost one billion dollars will be inaugurated on the campus in East Baltimore. With a glass facade suffused with light, it will offer not only top class medicine but also top class comfort: every patient will have his own room. Two 12-storey skyscrapers will dominate the skyline of the medical campus, towering above an entrance block the size of a football field. Both “towers” will accommodate two quite distinct disciplines: a hospital for cardiovascular diseases in one and a paediatric high performance center in the other.

A combination which could just be in homage to Helen Taussig.

www.jhu.edu
www.hopkinsmedicine.org

Partner News

The Power of Technology to Transform Health 

Bill Crounse, MD Senior Director, Worldwide Health Microsoft Corporation

As the world’s population continues to grow and age, our existing healthcare systems are struggling to keep up with the growing demand and escalating complexities.  To ensure everyone has safe and effective access to care, we must find a way to deliver high quality care in a sustainable, cost-effective way. Technology is a key enabler of this change. Since Healthcare is one of the most information-intensive sectors of the economy, an explosion of data occurs. But, healthcare is also among the least computerized. Therefore the healthcare industry has the greatest potential to boost the efficiency and quality of its service. However to truly transform health, we must also embrace a broader definition of health, looking beyond the traditional approach of ‘curing’ individuals and instead place an increased emphasis on ‘caring’ for individuals. Advances in communication and collaboration technologies are increasingly placing the patient at the center of the health universe. The economics of providing quality care, combined with the explosion of health-related information directly accessible to the consumer allow people to take more responsibility for their own well-being. This transformation, requires changes to how both consumers and care providers collect, collaborate and manage information over a longer period of time. Leveraging information technology is key in this transformation.

Today, Microsoft is partnering with governments and health organizations worldwide to better understand the central role technology plays in improving the delivery of services and its potential to connect an array of medical technologies and improve care and services, while curbing costs. Together with partners and customers we are build solutions that liberate data and drive truly scalable solutions that can benefit the individual patient, health professionals, health institutions and payers. In current health systems, patients’ health data is locked in silos. Physicians are forced to make treatment decisions based on incomplete data or waste time aggregating information. A complete health history enables providers to make better medical decisions, decrease wasteful spending, and increase the quality of care and empower consumers to be stewards of their own health data.

Microsoft is helping organizations integrate and aggregate their health information across systems, improving the communications and allowing a higher degree of collaboration and informed decision making, both from a care-giver and consumer-patient perspective. IT makes it possible for more medical care to take place at home rather than in costly hospitals, with virtual doctor visits and medical homes. A growing range of online health resources and services will help cut costs and increase access, particularly in countries that currently lag behind in healthcare.

However, transforming healthcare is a complex issue, and no single entity is going to fix it. But by partnering with health organizations and governments around the world, we believe software innovation can help people live longer, healthier lives.

Contact

World Health Summit Secretariat
c/o K.I.T Group GmbH
Association & Conference Management Group
Kurfürstendamm 71, 10709 Berlin
Tel.: +49 30 246 03 240
registration2010(at)worldhealthsummit.org