Europe’s Centre for Connected Health was launched yesterday in Belfast, Northern Ireland.   The timing could not have been better.  Collaborative Innovation is this year’s theme at today’s annual Davos summit for global business leaders.

The world’s financial markets may yesterday have been in A&E but the forward-thinking burghers of Belfast were sending a clear global message.  Connected Health – the booming business of better, faster, cheaper, healthcare – needs healthy connections.

The launch of the new European Centre for Connected Health (ECCH) in Belfast puts the north-western corner of Europe centre-stage in the healthcare challenges faced by governments and societies around the world.

The need for better healthcare solutions is all around us.   Aging populations, global epidemics and more than 1 billion overweight or obese people – these challenges get media attention.  Meanwhile medical science is delivering new and better treatments for all manner of ailments and societal expectations.  Traditional healthcare services are simply not geared to the massive growth in demand – particularly in ‘preventative medicine’ and 'remote care' to off-set the growth and costs of avoidable interventions.

Northern Ireland alone has an annual budget of US$8bn (£4bn) for healthcare.  Government ministers for Health and Finance were not slow to point out yesterday that an extra 1% investment in the ECCH initiative would certainly improve the health of the regional economy if the expertise and innovations developed, applied and proven in Northern Ireland are exploited world-wide.

Attending the launch, Eoin Lambkin, emphasised the need for collaborative innovation – particularly in the context of open interoperability of networks to support the vast range of body-worn monitors and remote healthcare management devices that are expected to play a huge role in reducing the pressure on hospital resources.

This theme was echoed by the operator of the largest non-profit healthcare organisation in the USA, Kaiser Permanente.  They see the key to success as ‘standards’ for interoperability – reducing costs and enabling faster development.   The European Centre for Connected Health is expected to play a major global role in providing a real-world test and development platform for all participants – bringing together technological, networking, healthcare and public policy perspectives.

Also attending the launch was Dave Whitlinger, president of Continua – the world’s leading consortium of health technologists.  Cooperation between industry partners – an eco-system for the evolution of ideas and market development – is another important part of this new initiative.

Belfast has a specific advantage as a location for the new centre.  It has already been selected for a major project to provide a fully mobile IP broadband network that is now being deployed as a secure overlay for the public sector.  The technology (HC-SDMA, also known as iBurst) is expected to be standardised as IEEE802.20 within the next 3 months.  It has been available in trial form in Belfast for nearly 3 years and the spectrum licence for the whole of the island of Ireland was acquired last year by PBUK Ltd in preparation for wider operational  deployment.

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For more information on the European Centre for Connected Health or the role of iBurst in service delivery, please contact our Northern Ireland office or visit the Centre's website. 

See also:

Connected Health - a new 'horticultural society' 

Connected Health ? - an introduction to the 'European Connected Health Campus'

'Making the Connections - creating the European Connected Health Campus'

ECH Campus pre-launch website