Across the world, health services and systems are changing to reflect the need for improvements in the quality, safety, accessibility and cost-effectiveness of healthcare. The use of ICTs in healthcare – e-health – has already demonstrated its value and contribution to enabling these changes. An emerging problem is the lack of interoperability between proprietary systems. As countries adopt e-health, they will need to integrate a patchwork of legacy systems with medical devices and information systems. At the same time, they will need to ensure there is a foundation on which stakeholders can innovate, since e-health can only meet its potential for achieving seamless, personalized and integrated care accessible to all if based on open and interoperable global standards.

This WTSA-12 side event will feature e-health experts showcasing different areas of e-health applications. The discussion will also focus on the next steps to be taken in standardization to realize the benefits of e-health.

Draft programme

• Opening remarks from Moderator: Bilel Jamoussi, ITU
• Keynote: Bright Simons, President, mPedigree Network: "e-Health: One Swallow Does Not Make a Summer"
• Standards perspective: Najeeb Al Shorbaji, Director of Knowledge Management and Sharing, World Health Organization: "Interoperability crucial to e-health adoption and acceptance"
• Regional perspective: Oliver Harrison, Director of Strategy, Health Authority Abu Dhabi: "e-Health Success Stories and Lessons Learned from the Arab Region - A five year progress review from Abu Dhabi"
• Industry perspective: Chuck Parker, Executive Director, Continua Health Alliance

By providing interoperability, standards provide a solid foundation on which innovation can take place to develop new, smarter solutions. The market size of developing countries provides unique opportunities for leveraging network effects to drive innovation. Thus, developing countries are expected to play an increasingly important role in ICT innovation.

The WTSA side event on ICT Innovations will explore the link between ICT innovations and standards in emerging markets, and discuss standardization requirements.

Draft programme

• Opening remarks and launching of ICT Innovation Application Challenge, Malcolm Johnson, TSB Director
• From Innovation to Standards: Ajay Ranjan Mishra, Chairman FG Innovation
• Citizen Initiative System – a view of participatory eGovernance, Mr Karma Bhutia, Managing Partner and Deepak Ramchandran, CTO and Co-founder, SourceN.com [Presentation]
• From Innovations to Collaborative Standardization, Ramy Ahmed, Telecommunication Regulatory Authority, Egypt [Presentation]
• A win-win situation, Dr Helmut Schink, Head of Industry Environment, Telco Standards [Presentation]

As recent events have shown the ability for networks to survive disasters is crucial for the coordination of rescue efforts and a return to normality.

This side event will review network resilience and recovery of infrastructure following disasters and standardization requirements for all of these issues. In addition, it will examine ICTs supporting disaster relief for individuals (to enable victims to notify relatives, friends, or employers) and disaster relief guidance (to show victims the routes to evacuation shelters, home, etc.).

Draft programme

• Opening remarks: Yukio HIRAMATSU, Professor, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), Japan
• Noriyuki Araki, Chairman of FG-DR&NRR, NTT, Japan [Presentation]
• Leo Lehmann, Vice Chairman of FG-DR&NRR, Federal Office of Communication, Switzerland [Presentation]