Belfast’s eHealth Week starts on June 13^th.

For some it is all about advances in health and social care – the field of ‘Connected Health’ where technology may help to ease the strains of ever-increasing demand for better support for more older people and less healthy youngsters.  We are generally not good at taking the long-term view but, if current trends continue, in 100 years time more than half of the UK’s children born in 2010 will still be around to see if any of these ideas have worked.

For some eHealth Week is all about the health of the economy.   It sometimes takes a massive disruption, global financial crisis, banking meltdown or Icelandic eruption, to shake dull minds into asking what are suddenly revealed as blindingly obvious questions.  Why, when we have soaring energy costs and deep concerns about pollution, do we still keep all the street lights switched on right through the night?  Why, when everything is so interconnected, do we doubt the need for vastly better connectivity?

The answers, to different questions of health, are as much to do with our perceptions of power – or lack of it – and our willingness to engage in finding solutions.  Not being part of the solution is a large part of the problem.

So it is not surprising to find a common theme – engagement – across a wide variety of different forums during the upcoming eHealth Week.

For the meeting of European experts gathering from across Europe on Sunday afternoon to review progress on the ‘prevention of disease’ there will be several hours spent agonising over how to motivate people to take greater control over their fitness – and whether the wreckage of modern ‘lifestyles’ is an inevitable measure of our inability to plan for the long term.  Such is the brilliance of modern medical practice that even those with multiple long-term conditions will survive long enough to count the cost.

For the 100 or so international delegates at the European Connected Health Summit starting on Monday there’s a focus on ‘Assisted Living’ – the delightfully positive terminology that’s used across the healthcare and social-care fields.   We hear much about older folk being enabled to live for longer in the comfort of their own homes.  One of the organisational challenges for governments and families is to try and coordinate these two branches of care that have, for decades, been in different budgetary silos.   Without doubt there is huge scope for technology to make life easier but getting it organised and paid for and used sensibly is the greater challenge.  It’s always so much easier to limit your vision to small objectives and not engage in the bigger picture.

On Tuesday and Wednesday this theme of Engagement will also exercise those who come from economies where healthcare is vastly more expensive than the UK but, apparently, delivers far less to the overall health of their nations.   The notion that financial motivations and discipline are a natural cure for any reluctance by patients to keep taking the tablets has been tested to death but seems not to have shaken faith in ‘market efficiency’.   Maybe the long-term answer lies in radical changes in educational priorities.  Was it really wise to sell off all those school playing fields to fuel the housing boom?  Do those who advocate expensive gym membership really understand the burden of overweight diabetics where diet is directly coupled to inability to cook nutritious meals ?

By Thursday and Friday the technologists of the Continua Healthcare Alliance will be in full flood – testing the interactive capabilities of umpteen varieties of body-worn monitors, bathroom scales that take your blood pressure and toothbrushes that take your temperature – a plug-fest for granny’s gadgets and an urgent need to move beyond big buttons in the quest for easy operation.

Meanwhile another forum will be seeking to engage people in the next generation of broadband connectivity.  The UK’s NextGen Roadshow is visiting Belfast for the first time in three years.  The theme of engagement is again writ large as community delegates will hear first hand of the striking economic and societal differences brought about by Fibre to the Home and Open Access networks.

Seeing the bigger pictures, understanding the longer-term objectives, will help those in NI place themselves in a global context where the old assumptions are no longer valid.   People in Boston Massachusetts may be surprised and upset that their broadband services are pathetic compared to those in Bucharest but Bostonians take no comfort from knowing that their services are still vastly better than in Belfast.

Whether it’s the health of the economy or the health of citizens or the health of regulators, the current global disruptions are forcing us all to sit up and take notice of the wider world.   Informed discontent is a powerful motivator – travel broadens the mind.  Wherever we perceive failings in infrastructure, healthcare or educational priorities, or the fitness for purpose of technological designs, it is time to declare that ‘up with this we shall not put’.   It’s time for each and everyone of us to work out what we are going to do about readjusting to realities.

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Notes:

This article ais also published in NI's Business First magazine at http://businessfirstonline.co.uk/features/re-adjusting_to_realities_-f193.html 

For the reference to relative broadband performance in Bucharest, Boston and Belfast see: http://www.groupe-intellex.com/editorials/18-gi-global/224-knee-bone-connected-to-the-thigh-bone.html