An international workshop on Healthcare in the 21st Century: Importance of Interoperability would be held here from November 21-23. The Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Co-operation (Comstech) will arrange the workshop with its mandate to focus on practical needs of the healthcare industry.
Assistant Co-ordinator General, Comstech, Dr Muhammad Ali Mahesar on Thursday said the objectives are to discuss the roadmap for healthcare in 21st century, introducing the participants with the role of interoperability in healthcare domain, introducing HL7 standard achieving interoperability among health systems and sharing the practical experience and knowledge constructing state of the art health systems.
He said HL7 can play a key role to bridge the gap of connectivity exists in present health systems and can provide better infrastructure of constructing future health systems. He said a series of lectures would be delivered on importance of healthcare interoperability, role of HL7 in achieving healthcare interoperability, survey of Global Initiatives in the domain of healthcare interoperability and practical challenges to address heterogeneity issue in existing health systems.
Dr Mahesar said healthcare IT Managers & Senior Professionals, Physicians and Practitioners, Pharmaceutical Managers, Health Insurance Providers, Policy Makers and Academicians would participate in the workshop. He said the dynamics of healthcare industry are both very attractive and challenging. Today, it is one of the fastest growing industries globally with over trillion dollar of market value. But as a whole it has been observed quite slow to adopt new technologies, and most physicians still continue to rely on paper records-leaving room for inefficiencies and medical errors. Delivering better and more efficient healthcare services has surfaced as a new challenge for 21st century, he added.