For the last couple of days, I have attended the Annual Conference of the  Royal Society of Medicine’s (RSM) “Telehealth and eHealth 2013 Conference: Ageing well: how can technology help?”, organised by the RSM’s Section on Telehealth & eHealth. Personally, it has been a hugely inspiring conference, because it focused on the three key elements of this thing we call eHealth. I firmly believe that the 3 edges of the triangle of eHealth should be patient-centredness, good use of technology and public health:

• This conference has been highly patient-centric. I recently attended the Medicine 2.0’13 Conference and was disappointed of how much it was focusing on the business and data-harvesting aspects of eHealth. This is only my perception, which is probably due to the fact that I have always worked, and am passionate about, the public sector. So it was great to really feel how all these outstanding speakers (Mary Baker, Charles Lowe, Baroness Masham of Ilton, Malcolm Fisk or Rabbi Yehuda Pink, amongst others) do genuinely care about the people, about the patients. I was also pleasantly surprised by the humble and realistic talk about care homes by BUPA Care Services Medical Director Andrew Cannon.

• Needless to say, this conference was very strong on how technology can help older people live healthier lives, by improving their quality of life (QoL). Having worked at the University of Oxford’s PROMs Group for a while, I know well the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of PROMs, so I completely agree that PROMs must be our weapons of choice to measure the impact of eHealth on people’s QoL. Two of my favourite quotes from the last two days are very illustrative of the approach to technology and health care during this conference. During his presentation, Dr M Vernon said that “we can use the technology we already have to improve health care”. I could not agree more: we must keep things as simple and as affordable as possible, if we want eHealth to become really mainstream in health care. My other favourite quote was by Rabbi Y Pink: “technology is God’s gift to humanity to improve our quality of life”. This made an atheist like myself smile, in a good way. It is crucial that relevant people in the community can pass the message in such a clever, easy to understand manner.

• Last, but not least, I did thoroughly enjoy the focus on public health that this event had. In my humble opinion, there is still a lot (a lot) to be done in terms of public health and eHealth. It was great to learn about relevant initiatives from the European Commission, such as the imminent Green Paper on mHealth. I intend to post about this when it is published in a few weeks.

Finally, I was personally very interested to hear about many existing end of life/palliative care and dementia eHealth projects.

This is my take on this year’s RSM Telehealth and eHealth Conference. I would be very interested to hear your views, either via Twitter or as a comment to this post (below).