Looking back at the 2023 International Bologna Consensus Assembly on Telemedicine

On March 11th 2023, we had the pleasure of meeting the community of Italian doctors and researchers behind our parent organization the Italian Society of Telemedicine (a scientific Society accredited at the Italian Ministry of Health, and thus in the capacity of emanating guidelines, with some legally binding authority attached, around the practices of digital medicine)

In Bologna the weather was splendid, as you can tell, and nevertheless the venue has been constantly full and bustling, a testament to the interest provoked by the scientific program overall

It's been refreshing to meet such a diverse community of practitioners, and to discuss with them about the opportunities and pitfalls of the quickly evolving European ecosystem around digital health. So many interesting and provoking ideas have been shared and discussed, about familial scenarios (risk scenarios in digital health, centrality of ID solutions to service ecosystems, digital art and humanities to augment the experience of care, ...), and some that we hadn't thought about yet (we had the pleasure of meeting a group of representatives from the BioDynaMo collaboration, presenting their ideas about accelerating R&I in medical and lifescience research through adoption of mesoscale reusable models)... we come back with connections and promises to reiterate and deepen conversations that could significantly enrich our impact.

Almost 800 professionals attended the event (or so we heard from the organizing committee), and we had the opportunity to make new connections, like Dr Tapani Piha who told us about the state of the art of digital health in Finland and brought the greetings of the Finnish Society of Telemedicine & eHealth.

Among the biggest announcements for us, there was definitely the editorial initiative we are launching with an ambitious pan-European breadth

and we will for sure devote a new post entirely to sharing with you the exciting plan, and a call to join us in making it happen...

A special word of thanks goes to our members who joined the session "Concertation And Distributed Intelligence In Europe" significantly contributing to the overall success of the event, and offering the most striking testament of the value of connecting across borders (both geopolitically and culturally):

• Dr Isabelle Wachsmuth in her lecture "The sociotechnical dimension of augmented intelligence in a digital healthcare ecosystem" has elucidated the accumulating evidences about the impact of art and humanities on the perceived quality of care and its health related outcomes, offering the disruptive suggestion to consider digitalization as a tool not just for augmenting the performance of technical tasks, but as a vehicle to empower a more humane experience, preserving the intimacy of the relationship of care and of the lived experience even along the trajectory of disease and healing. 
• Prof Nicola Dragoni in his lecture "The Dark Side of Digital Health" has offered an excursus about the risks introduced by connectivity and by the introduction of pervasive "intelligence" across the value chain of healthcare, beyond data. With sagacity and wisdom he has accompanied the audience through an exploration of accidents (ransomwares, device tamperings, ...) occurred in recent years, calling our attention on the dangerously flat trend of the industry's response to growing risks that can affect medical practice from the scale of personal experience all the way to becoming a National vulnerability. 
• Prof Mario Giardini with his lecture "Innovation in healthcare: collaboration and impact generation" has concluded the session by sharing with us his first person experience in making innovation possible. He told us about the importance of rethinking how impact is accounted for, walked us through the dynamics of evolving roles and relationships that occurs along the trajectory from research to innovation and impact, and explained how the funding tools and the management of operations shift (or should do so to be successful).

Hopefully, we will be able to share with you soon some slides and recommended lectures... so stay tuned. And don't wait, get in touch with us by emailing isomerism.eu[AT]gmail.com if you recognize that the topics discussed were relevant to what you are doing!

Curarsi con un clic.mp4 from Diessecom on Vimeo.