26 September 2006 — NDMA President Derek Danois was among a panel of eHealth experts invited to participate in the first of 15 events sponsored by The British Publishers Global eHealth Initiative. An online recording of The Denmark Digital Imaging Roundtable, held on 12 September 2006, is now available online.

The Global eHealth Initiative focuses on 15 regions/countries, the current state of their eHealth market, and end-user and economic trends shaping current and future demand.

"It is incumbent upon vendors who want to drive the next level of interoperability to think of healthcare as an ecosystem," Danois told the roundtable. "All these different technologies and data elements have to be tied together. It's more than system interoperability, it is workflow interoperability."

Chaired by Hanna Pohjonen of Rosalieco Oy, roundtable participants included: Christian Claydon-Smith, Aarhus Hospital; Neils Rossing, IT Health Telematics; Claus Duedal Pedersen, Danish centre for Health Telematics; Andy Dobbs, Medical Insight; Andreas Kjaer, Copenhagen University Hospital; Nino Da Silva, eCare; Adrian Stevens, Agfa Healthcare; Derek Danois, NDMA; and Nicolas Olszowski, Sun Microsystems.

"Historically in healthcare, the customer had to select best-of-breed and then figure out how to integrate them all," Danois said. "Wise vendors are taking it upon themselves to provide integration strategies before going to a customer, so what they present is a consolidated, integrated solution at the outset. So whether it includes sophisticated architectures, middleware layers for interoperability, master patient indexing or visualization with traditional vendors with HIS and RIS systems — there's where you get the innovation."

See the roundtable discussion online at http://insitu.podia.net/?c=171.