Key healthcare infrastructures are a sensitive target. Security in digital health extends way beyond "data security and privacy"

"A source familiar with the outage said the National Cyber Security Centre, the Cabinet Office and other government agencies had been alerted to the incident, given the group’s role in sensitive areas such as Royal Navy training centres and security at Ministry of Defence bases.

People at sites including critical national infrastructure have resorted to using radios, pens and paper, the source said.

Some employees still have access to computers and email, and the company said its investigation was in the early stages and that it was too soon to tell if the failure was caused by a cyber-attack."

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/31/capita-it-systems-fail-cyber-attack-nhs-fears 

The above is an example of why digital health should adopt a strong security culture, and conversations, including those around digital health and telemedicine like the ones we held at the recent meeting in Bologna (read our previous posts here and here) should engage medical practitioners in thinking beyond data policies and privacy, embracing risk qualification and mitigation strategies when thinking about innovation of practices and novel value delivery in healthcare.

We thank again Professor Nicola Dragoni for the stimulating talk about risk and security in healthcare he gave during our session at the Bologna Assembly, which triggered many conversations in the followup, and we hope to launch a devoted activity to promote secure practices in digital health in Europe.

Innovation in healthcare: collaboration and impact generation

 At the recent International Bologna Consensus Assembly on Telemedicine, ISOMERISM had the great pleasure of hosting a session dedicated to Concertation and distributed intelligence in Europe (if you want to read more about the session overall, please check our previous post) and we are proud to claim the session has been among the most stimulating, judging by the interactions triggered during its development and in follow up exchanges.

Repeatedly we have been asked to share the material that has been presented, and we are overjoyed to announce that Professor Giardini has been so kind to share with us his presentation!

Click here to access the slide kit.

Professor Giardini has masterfully discussed the distortions that inappropriate research assessment practices impose on the impact generation of R&I, and walked the audience through real life examples of how, through selecting appropriate metrics of success and impact, and by matching funding instruments of adequate size and reasonable competitiveness for the stage, it is possible to bring meaningful innovation to the ground.

The story of the teleophtalmology project, with its elements of reverse and bottom up innovation, of serendipity, and shared learning, is a joy of its own.

If you are interested in the topic, and would like to contribute to the European conversation around advancing research assessment, please consider signing the CoARA agreement.

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.

La complessità dei sistemi viventi: I codici della vita

Sabato 11 Marzo 2023, alle 17:15 CET, la SIT avrà il piacere di ospitare il Professor Marcello Barbieri che inaugurerà le celebrazioni per il decennale del Centro Internazionale Studi di Telemedicina "Giancarmine Russo" parlando della complessità dei sistemi viventi.

Il Professor Barbieri ci parlerà dei codici della vita, e ci aggiornerà sui progressi fatti dallo studioso nel campo della complessità dei viventi, dal lancio di La Teoria Semantica dell’Evoluzione di cui Karl Popper ebbe a dire “Un libro meraviglioso… la presentazione è incantevole… la teoria è rivoluzionaria.” ad oggi.

Un viaggio culturalmente intenso, a cui invitiamo i partecipanti a prepararsi consultando almeno il catalogo dei codici biologici messoci a disposizione dal Professore stesso. 

Per accompagnare il catalogo, e per quanti siano desiderosi di acquisire una prospettiva storica sul pensiero del Professore, possiamo suggerire la visione di questa recente intervista documentario:

Condividiamo anche alcune letture raccomandate a chi volesse approfondire il pensiero sulla complessità dopo l'incontro:

Nothing in Evolution Makes Sense Except in the Light of Code Biology

Introduction to Biosemiotics

The Codes of Life

Code Biology

Non mancate questa preziosa occasione di incontrare uno dei giganti del pensiero biomedico del XX e XXI secolo...

Vi aspettiamo a braccia aperte e siamo sicuri di assistere ad uno scambio di altissimo valore intellettuale durante la discussione col pubblico.

BioDynaMo will be present at the International Bologna Consensus Assembly on Telemedicine on March 11th 2023

BioDynaMo will join the International Bologna Consensus Assembly, by offering a satellite workshop about the state of the art in exploiting computational simulations in healthcare.

Breaking News (especially relevant to those still uncertain about attending): BioDynaMo has been awarded the Best Artifact Award at PPoPP 2023

The program of the workshop is

BioDynaMo - building the future today.

Learning how to improve diagnosis of, and think about, human diseases with computational models. (15min)

Roman Bauer. University of Surrey (UK) - Spokesperson of BioDynaMo

 

BioDynaMo, a high performance suite to apply agent based simulations to real world challenges. (15min)

Vasileios Vavourakis. University of Cyprus (CY) - Technical Coordinator of BioDynaMo

 

Practices at the edge of learning from data and reasoning from first principles in computational medicine. (15min)

Taghi Aliyev. SCImPULSE Foundation (NL) - CTO SCImPULSE Foundation

Technical demo - Installation and first steps in using BioDynaMo (15min)

 

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Don't miss out, registration is free!!!

But remember to register by March the 1st ^_^

How does ML/automatisation interact with skills in surgery?

According to a new Working Paper by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, titled "Technology, skills, and performance: the case of robots in surgery" (available here)

robots have the potential to reduce variation in patient outcomes that would arise from heterogeneity in surgeons’ skills.

Interestingly, it also points out an important inefficiency of our innovation systems: lower skilled surgeons may face a higher cost of using the robot as they are usually operating in less "ready" settings, and thus, despite them/their patients having the highest gains, they are less likely to use the robot on any given patient.

These findings, that we would love to see replicated in other ecosystems (e.g. Italy?) seem to highlight the existence of an organisational gap between the necessity of testing new technologies (R&D) in high performing settings to better control confounders, and the need to transfer those new technologies in unprivileged settings to truly profit from investing in them.

Policy makers should focus on new redistributive investment strategies to ensure widespread adoption of new tools there where they can have the most impact, thus optimizing societal cost/benefit ratio of innovation in medicine.

Survey for citizens - Digital Health apps that matter to you

 The EU HPC/Exascale Centre of Excellence in Personalised Medicine ( PerMedCoE ) consortium is seeking input by European citizenes about their health apps use

Please take the survey for patients, informal caregivers and citizens and give your feedback to contribute to our understanding of how to address needs and preferences of European citizens in choosing health apps. 

The survey is available in all EU languages here!