07 Apr 2011
The Health Informatics Congress 2011 (HC2011) show kicked off on Tuesday at Birmingham's ICC. This is a show in which companies and professionals from the health technology industry show products and share information with their peers.
And health technology is increasingly making the mainstream press with Monday's announcement from IBM that it has created a semiconductor using nanotechnology that is able to detect and eradicate the MRSA virus. This follows last month's Technology Engineering and Design (TED) forum story about a ‘real' kidney having been printed by a 3D printer using the patient's own cells grown outside the body.
At last year's show, unsurprisingly titled HC2010, there was a lot of talk about what the new government would bring combined with criticism of the last government's centralised approach to health as epitomised by the National Programme for IT (NPfIT). At this year's show, there was a real buzz around the changes the coalition government proposes to make and how they will impact the health technology industry.
Arguably the sentiment here regarding those changes, which include the abolition of primary care trusts, is more positive than that expressed by the wider population.
Delegates to HC2011 are obviously on board when it comes to Health Secretary Andrew Lansley's ‘information revolution'. Lansley is the first secretary of state ever to attend the show.
This information revolution is one that technology experts, able to mine and manipulate data for the greater good, can help deliver. If data is categorised and managed properly it will bring efficiency savings, improve productivity by enabling better treatment and "hold a mirror' to health professionals that may have previously been less accountable.
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