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The ministry wants to improve early detection of strokes.

In May, the annual meeting of internists in Germany took place in Wiesbaden - and was attended by around 8,300 physicians and experts, as well as 2,000 patients. The 125th Congress of the German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM) looked at digital medicine and the opportunities, risks and perspectives in connection with major topics such as intensive care medicine, rare diseases, non-drug therapies and health research. So, what opportunities does digital medicine offer the internist? According to speakers at the congress this year, the aim must be to use digitisation tools effectively in order to facilitate earlier diagnosis and better treatments.  "Ultimately, we want to gain more time to turn to the patients - a concern of ours that can be achieved with digital medicine, if used properly," said Professor Claus Vogelmeier, chairman of the event. The conference looked at big data and data security, as well as personalised colorectal cancer screening and the potential for digital tools in specific diseases such as thyroid carcinoma. On the record Doctors should not be controlled by fears, but by hope and optimism, said Professor Vogelmeier, while Frank Ulrich Montgomery, president of the German Medical Association (BÄK), argued that Germany was behind in terms of digitising its healthcare system, particularly when compared to other modern industrialised countries. “In many countries that we regard as developing countries, the possibilities and opportunities of digitisation have been used and understood much more than in our country, " he told delegates at the event. Need for patient empowerment The conference also organised a special ‘Patient Day’, which was attended by around 2,000 people, and, at a press conference, physician and comedian Eckart von Hirschhausen talked about empowering patients through the use of digital tools. "We urgently need transparent, publicly financed jointly financed sites and search engines with evidence-based, tested content without commercial interests," Hirschhausen said. Focus on research centres In addition, the congress presented to the public results from research carried out by the German Centers for Health Research (DZG), in which certain major disease areas are investigated and researched with a result- and application-oriented approach. The aim is to prepare internists for everyday practice and shift the focus to a holistic approach, according to speakers at the event. Meanwhile, with the "Young Internists Forum", the congress was also aimed specifically at students and young doctors of internal medicine who visited it numerous times. More information can be found here. Anna Engberg is a Wiesbaden-based freelance journalist specialising in health and technology.

New EHR decisions impacted around 380 hospitals outside the US last year, according to research firm KLAS.

King’s College London and NVIDIA are collaborating on a new platform that will broaden the scope of AI in NHS hospital radiology services across the UK.

With smart baby scales, a German startup now wants to tackle problems in the postnatal phase - and create more accurate comparative data worldwide.

Newly-published survey indicates that nearly half of Germans polled believe that the medical care of the future will be digital.

A large-scale EHR implementation in Denmark has faced some resistance from clinical staff; medical doctors found it difficult and time consuming to input data by typing. A pilot project with speech recognition has now shown significant workflow improvements that can potentially reduce resistance to EHR adoption. Anne Werner Løhndorf, department manager for Public & Healthcare Technology in NNIT and Mette Lindelof, a neurology consultant from the Zealand region, will present the findings of the pilot project at the HIMSS & Health 2.0 European Conference in Helsinki. The largest IT project in Danish healthcare The Zealand Region and the Copenhagen Capital Region in Denmark have jointly implemented the Healthcare Platform – what is believed to be the largest IT implementation project of Danish healthcare ever. As a result, 44,000 healthcare employees and 2.5 million citizens will be provided with EHRs in the Healthcare Platform. During the last quarter of 2018, the two regions in Denmark have added speech recognition to support data capturing and workflow efficiency in the Healthcare Platform.  The pilot project looked at how speech recognition can provide better user experience for the clinical staff, more efficient workflows at the clinic, higher quality in the documentation and an improved patient interaction.     Twenty-one doctors and two nurses at a neurological department were selected to test speech recognition within the pilot project, which suggests that speech recognition will be able to avert some of the challenges that doctors experience, and at the same time support the collection and use of structured data. US study confirmed EHR optimization with speech recognition A previously conducted multi-year study in the US had come to similar findings as the pilot study in Denmark. The US study, conducted at the Vassar Brothers Medical Center, found that the EHR Net Promoter Score improved by 99 points after using speech recognition compared to previous input modalities. This illustrates the significant increase in user satisfaction with EHRs. Accordingly, 95% of users - primarily doctors, but also nurses and other medical staff - found the introduction of speech recognition for electronic documentation a good idea. Nuance Healthcare to showcase latest speech recognition advancements In Helsinki, delegates of the HIMSS & Health 2.0 European Conference can see the latest speech recognition technology at booth 6D21. Nuance Healthcare, one of the world’s largest and most innovative speech recognition providers for healthcare, will showcase its Dragon Medical solution with artificial intelligence features. "We’ve added Artificial Intelligence to our speech recognition solution. This creates a completely new user experience. Gone are the days of voice profile trainings; Dragon Medical now delivers high recognition accuracy right from the start," says Milko Jovanoski, international marketing director for Nuance Healthcare. "Even more though, deep learning algorithms let it adapt to the user’s active vocabulary by inspecting texts the user has created in the past, both by adding custom words to its active vocabulary and by learning the typical phrases and text patterns the user employs," he added.   For the diary: The Health Anywhere Anytime session will take place on June 12 from 15:15 - 17:15 Nuance Healthcare booth: 6D21 This sponsored article is part of 'The Road to Helsinki' series, which highlights innovative sessions and technologies at the HIMSS & Health 2.0 European Conference taking place in Helsinki, 11-13 June 2019. Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

The Swiss Healthcare Startups association wants to better connect the Swiss healthcare market and promote young entrepreneurs.

German medical students can now continue their education in the digital health sector.

Women are notoriously underrepresented in health tech, which can have detrimental impacts on the industry as a whole.