PRAEVENIRE workshop on the future of digital health

The kick-off of the 4th PRAEVENIRE Health Days was all about digitalisation. Health experts and decision-makers worked on the topic of digital health in a full-day workshop led by Prof. Dr Reinhard Riedl, head of the BFH Digital Society Centre and co-head of the Digital Enabling Institute. The Digital Health workshop was designed as a participatory decision-making process to serve as a basis for the development of a digitalisation strategy in the White Paper “Future of Health Care” of the PRAEVENIRE Initiative Health 2030. The premise for the extensive discussions in groups as well as in the plenary was the aspect of digitalisation as an enabler: for patients as well as for health professionals and those responsible for steering the health system. Especially in the health sector, the interaction between man and machine will gain in importance.

Prof. Dr. Reinhard Riedl

“If you pit the machine against the human in a defined framework, the human beats almost every time, but the first place is taken by human-machine collaboration,” says workshop leader Prof. Dr. Reinhard Riedl, head of the BFH Centre Institute Digital Enabling at the Bern University of Applied Sciences Business. In the group work, numerous perspectives and aspects of digitalisation were discussed: the positive and negative aspects, the top priorities as well as the visions for the year 2030. During the Lunch Talks, Dr Florian Burger from the Vienna Chamber of Labour, Dr Michael Binder, Medical Director of the Vienna Hospital Association, and Prof. Dr Erik Graf from the Bern University of Applied Sciences gave exciting keynotes. Burger spoke about big data in healthcare, Binder dealt with trends in the field of digital health and Graf went into more detail about practical challenges in the use of artificial intelligence in medtech.

Prof. Dr. Peter Kirchschläger

In the afternoon, Prof. Dr. Peter Kirchschläger from the University of Lucerne gave an intensively discussed keynote speech on ethical issues in the digitalisation process. “The essential thing for me is that digitisation is not only aligned with an economic purpose and seen in the service of increasing efficiency. Because people are bearers of human dignity and also have the possibility to take responsibility for ethical action,” he said. “Today we have succeeded in collecting a positive overall perspective and a summary of the problems at hand as well as important points a roadmap until 2030. This is a very good prerequisite for working out the White Paper process in the field of Digital Health in a very concrete way,” Prof. Dr. Reinhard Riedl summed up the kick-off workshop of the 4th PRAEVENIRE Health Days at Stift Seitenstetten. “There was a great consensus that both the patients and the health staff must be at the centre. The participants agreed that one has to approach the problems in a knowledge-based and factual way, but at the same time take the emotional aspects into account. And that it is necessary and helps the discussion to look at the issues from all perspectives,” Riedl summarised.


Further information on the PRAEVENIRE Health Days 2019 can be found here.

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