Making the eHealth Connection: Global Partnerships, Local Solutions

Keynote presentations opening each of the first two week-long sessions highlighted the plight of economically poor and vulnerable people around the world, and illustrated the ways that ICTs could be brought to bear on addressing a variety of health problems. For example, one speaker expressed optimism that the mobile phone generation will adapt to and adopt new technologies to address the gap in health services between developed and developing countries, demonstrating how video technology could be used to show complicated health procedures – including complex surgeries - to health practitioners far afield. One theme running throughout many of the presentations was that of the power of collaboration and advocacy to support the development of eHealth. For instance, the World Health Organization (WHO)'s Tim Evans challenged participants to create meaningful alliances and partnerships that will place eHealth more centrally on the global health agenda.

By offering video and PowerPoint presentations of these presentations, as well as downloadable materials from each conference session, on the Making the eHealth Connection website, organisers hope to make the information provided at the conference accessible to a wider audience. For example, by accessing the PowerPoint presentation titled "Reaching a Vision for eHealth Through Collaboration", one may read about the core concepts behind the initiative. In addition, to carry through on the exchange of ideas between sectors and regions that occurred during the small-group presentations, large-group discussions, and break-out meetings held in Bellagio on each week's themes, a series of interactive blogs on the site is designed to provide an interactive platform for comments and responses to the ideas coming out of Bellagio.

Also, organisers launched an e-group with the goal of collecting photos from the field of eHealth. The point of this group is not to define eHealth, but to share photographs of all uses of ICTs to improve health of populations and individuals. To seed the group, this online space started with photos of people joining the Bellagio conference series, but they "encourage others working in the field of eHealth to join the group, and share your photos of conferences, convenings, systems, architectures, patients, teachers, researchers, users, servers, mobile data collection systems, telemedicine samples, infrastructure set-ups, late-night coding sessions, and everything else dealing with the wide world of eHealth."

Health, Technology.

According to organisers, "some countries (such as Brazil, Thailand, and Rwanda) are already committed to major eHealth endeavors while others are poised to follow suit. Yet, despite this promising burst of activity, many questions remain about how eHealth can become sustainable and bring about significant change. With technology now at a tipping point in the Global South, experts agree that this is the optimal moment for eHealth to have the greatest impact. For the first time, for example, there are more people in the world with mobile phones than without - some 3.5 billion cell phone users in all. Not only have wireless networks spread rapidly throughout the Global South, but fewer old systems exist than in the Global North. This environment has created a fresh technical infrastructure that can allow eHealth to 'leapfrog' toward integrated national eHealth platforms."

The action-oriented agenda of Making the eHealth Connection includes 8 key areas, all designed to identify new approaches for delivering health services and information in a fundamentally different way throughout the Global South:

1. Public health informatics and national health information systems
2. Interoperability
3. Access to health information and knowledge-sharing
4. Health informatics and eHealth capacity building
5. Electronic health records
6. Mobile health and telemedicine
7. eHealth markets
8. National eHealth policies