Why preparing World of Health IT is so fun

Healthcare communications consultant Teresa Bau discusses preparing the World of Health IT (WoHIT), meeting healthcare professionals and working in areas close to her heart.

I have been working with HIMSS Europe for nearly six months in the preparation of the World of Health IT (WoHIT), the perfect meeting point for European digital health stakeholders. The programme includes key names in the fields of mobile health, genomics, cybersecurity in healthcare and integrated care.

Helping HIMSS Europe in communications have allowed me to meet passionate professionals that are trying to change the way healthcare is delivered. Interviewing Richard Daniels, executive vice president and chief information officer at Kaiser Permanente, I learned about the power of patients’ data. EHR is the information backbone across Kaiser’s 38 hospitals and 620 medical facilities and it is used to continuously improve care. At WoHIT, Daniels will discuss how EHR has improved the quality and integration of care in his organisation.

Another great experience was meeting Dr Zubin Damania, aka ZDoggMD, a physician that worked in Stanford hospital for almost ten years. Damania got burnt out because over the years the administrative work started to grow and he could spend less time with his patients. So he turned to his other passion: music. Damiana told me that he started to make music “as a sort of a cry for help, a way to try to regain my voice”. He is now a rapper that composes songs to bring change to the healthcare industry. He has songs about EHR, Zika virus, strokes, dying with dignity and dozens of other healthcare topics. In Barcelona, Damiana will talk about bringing humanity back to medicine and, yes, he will also sing.

But the closest subject to my heart during these months have been the creation of the Women in Health IT Community, a platform for women professionals to share knowledge and work towards gender equality. A recent HIMSS study highlighted that women in Health IT are getting paid considerably less than their men colleagues to do the same job. The Tweet Chat we organised about the subject was extremely successful with over one hundred participants and more than 500 tweets. The expectations about the new community are high and I am sure it will make a difference in the Health IT sector.

The cybersecurity Tweet Chat (#eHealthChat) was also a passionate discussion with high level participants. Such a critical topic is not always given the importance it deserves. The number of attacks to organisations is growing as patients’ data is becoming a very valuable asset. Millions of records of sensitive data are stolen but only a few of them are public. I am excited to know more about this key topic at the cybersecurity sessions programmed at WoHIT.

The congress is less than one week away and we are all set in Barcelona. The city has become a key hub for digital health in Europe and World of Health IT will be a great opportunity for stakeholders to gather knowledge and network.

Let the show begin.