Karl A. Stroetmann

• MBA PhD
• adjunct Professor at University of Victoria

South Africa was the most affected country in Africa by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, where over 4 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 102,000 deaths have been recorded since 2019. Aside from clinical methods, artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions such as machine learning (ML) models have been employed in treatin...

Background Vaccinated persons are still prone to SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infection since vaccines do not offer 100% protection. Thus, quick decision-making on identifying high-risk persons prone to COVID-19 breakthrough infection is essential for effective medical care and cost saving. We explore how one can use Explainable Artificial Intelligence...

Background COVID-19 vaccines offer different levels of immune protection but do not provide 100% protection. Vaccinated persons with pre-existing comorbidities may be at an increased risk of SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infection or reinfection. The aim of this study is to identify the critical variables associated with a higher probability of SARS-CoV-...

Background: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, various clinical intervention methods and AI methods have been employed in the detection, diagnosis, and prognosis of COVID-19 cases. However, limited instances of applying AI to the prognosis of COVID-19 cases in Africa have been reported in the literature. Thus, case studies on the application of...

A conceptual artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled framework is presented in this study involving triangulation of various diagnostic methods for management of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and its associated comorbidities in resource-limited settings (RLS). The proposed AI-enabled framework will afford capabilities to harness low-cost polymer...

This document outlines the dissemination approach geared towards adequately reflecting the large scale and broad aims of the UNICOM innovation action. It welcomes the UNICOM consortium multistakeholder constituency and designs active roles for all partners as impact multipliers – leveraging their existing ecosystems. D12.2 develops a communication...

Substantial investment in digital solutions for improved health services has occurred in recent years in Africa. Digital Health provides for proven, beneficial applications in many different areas of health systems. It supports the transformation of healthcare delivery, and its potential is seemingly boundless. However, the deployed systems are in...

Better health enables greater wealth. And digital health enables better healthcare. Also across resource-constraint countries digital health applications are becoming more prevalent. To establish a resilient national or district Digital Health Ecosystem, not only a holistic strategy – based on health policy priorities – is mandatory, but it must al...

Better health enables greater wealth. And digital health enables better healthcare. Also across resource-constraint countries digital health applications are becoming more prevalent. To establish a resilient national or district Digital Health Ecosystem, not only a holistic strategy-based on health policy priorities-is mandatory, but it must also b...

The book presents a framework and actionable approach for national or district Digital Health Ecosystems based on an open platform infrastructure. This implementation guide constructively supports, facilitates and directs the development of digital health ecosystems in districts, countries and regions of Africa. It puts forward that isolated Digit...

Global attention to the danger of falsified medicinal products is gaining momentum. Weak, ineffective or dangerous medicinal products are a serious threat to patient safety and public health. In 2011, to address the threat of falsified medicines, Directive 2011/62/EU amended Directive 2001/83/EC to include measures aimed at preventing the entry of...

This report presents the outcomes of the “Pilot on eHealth Indicators” study, carried out by empirica in association with IPSOS on behalf of the European Commission, Information Society and Media Directorate-General. The data used for this report were collected by means of a survey of primary care physicians and their use of ICT for eHealth pur...

Intermediate results from an ongoing health technology assessment exercise of a simulation model of paediatric cardiomyopathy are reported. Comprehensive data on paediatric cardiomyopathy/heart failure, treatment options, incidence and prevalence, prognoses for different outcomes to be expected were collected. Based on this knowledge, a detailed cl...

Intermediate results from an ongoing health technology assessment exercise of a simulation model of paediatric cardiomyopathy are reported. Comprehensive data on paediatric cardiomyopathy/heart failure, treatment options, incidence and prevalence, prognoses for different outcomes to be expected were collected. Based on this knowledge, a detailed cl...

To better enable safe cross-border healthcare delivery, particularly the exchange of ePrescriptions, the EU funded openMedicinke project explores the unique identification of medicinal products (MPs) in such settings. Major stakeholders harmonise their respective efforts to deliver • common data models for MPs • a common vocabulary for their unambi...

To better enable cross-border healthcare delivery, particularly the exchange of ePrescriptions, this global undertaking advances the unique identification of medicinal products (MPs) and patient safety in cross-border settings. Major stakeholders harmonise their respective efforts to deliver • common data models for prescribed MPs • a common vocabu...

Driven by the diverse needs for exchanging patient, other healthcare and health system data with the aim to improve the overall quality and efficiency of healthcare provision, regions and countries globally have been developing electronic platforms to gather and exchange such data. Based on an initial sample of more than 50 potential cases, eight s...

The objective of our work was to improve healthcare services supported by eHealth applications in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by proposing interoperability that is proportional, in terms of costs and benefits, to immediate demands and is capable to enable future scenarios of growth. (e)Health represents a very complex system with many stakeholders, se...

By taking a stakeholder perspective, the paper explores reasons why the political commitment to patient-centric integrated care, facilitated by eHealth applications, is so difficult to meet. In spite of hundreds of pilots, still today there is a dearth of evidence on how to indeed successfully organise such services. Outcomes from a variety of impl...

The prevalence of dementias is expected to double to 66 million by 2030 and 115 million people by 2050. The global cost was estimated at US$ 600 billion (€475 billion) for 2010 – about 1% of the world gross domestic product. An early and unambiguous diagnosis of dementias will have dramatic benefits for the individual, but also for healthcare syste...

This paper will identify the legal and ethical challenges in Europe of clinical data governance in health informatics and classify the various legal bases for sharing a dataset.

The paper reviews work performed as part of the ISAES (Interoperable eSystems for Africa Enhanced by Satellites) Study. Global empirical evidence on national and district eHealth platforms was gathered, and opportunities and challenges analysed towards designing an eHealth platform for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The approach, method, and selection c...

The generic concept of interoperability is briefly reviewed, before describing the approach taken in defining eHealth interoperability, based on a reflection of the diverse needs for exchanging patient, other healthcare and health system data with the aim to improve the overall quality and efficiency of healthcare provision. Next, the method applie...

This book contains a selection of articles from The 2014 World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (WorldCIST'14), held between the 15th and 18th of April in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, a global forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss recent results and innovations, current trends, professional experiences and...

This study analyses the relevance, efficiency and effectiveness of the Research Infrastructures (RI) component of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), assesses its European Added Value and suggests options for future Community RI actions. A key part of our approach has been to categorise the FP7 RI activities into ‘Thematic Areas’, classifying t...

The generic concept of interoperability is briefly reviewed, before describing the approach taken in defining eHealth interoperability, based on a reflection of the diverse needs for exchanging patient, other healthcare and health system data with the aim to improve the overall quality and efficiency of healthcare provision. Next, the method applie...

European funding under Framework 7 (FP7) for the virtual physiological human (VPH) project has been in place now for 5 years. The VPH Network of Excellence (NoE) has been set up to help develop common standards, open source software, freely accessible data and model repositories, and various training and dissemination activities for the project. It...

Welche Regelungen auf europäischer Ebene bestimmen den Umgang mit elektronischen Gesundheitsdaten? Wie begegnen EU-Mitgliedsstaaten den Herausforderungen von elektronischer Patientenakte und elektronischem Rezept? Können Daten für Forschungszwecke genutzt werden?

Biocomputational modeling as developed under the European Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) and the US NIH program on "Predictive Multiscale Models of the Physiome in Health and Disease" is the area of ICT to most likely revolutionize the practice of medicine. The VPH is a framework of methods and technologies that, once fully established, will mak...

To assure sustainability of our health systems and improve quality, implementing integrated wellness, health and social care service models have been proposed. They will need the enabling power of Health ICT facilitated systems and applications. Such solutions support the efficient coordination of service provision across provider and jurisdictiona...

The use of IT enabled health services such as an electronic patient summary, ePrescription or telemedicine (commonly called eHealth services) are subject to differing degrees of legal regulation across Europe. This article presents the legal challenges facing further diffusion of eHealth services across Europe, based on the results of a study funde...

To summarize lessons learned from the European Commission (EC) co-funded project SmartPersonalHealth, a project to promote a greater understanding of the value of interoperability among Personal Health Systems (PHS) and between them and other eHealth systems, in the landscape of continuity of care and across multi-cultural environments in Europe. K...

eHealth in African countries must support local, regional and national health strategies alongside demands for other healthcare resources for more doctors, other healthcare professionals, drugs, vaccines, preventative programmes and facilities. eHealth must be affordable. Comparative studies in European and African contexts show an approach for rat...

Europe’s countries have made substantial progress towards modern eHealth infrastructures and implementations, thereby leading the rest of the world. Following the Communication of the European Commission (EC) on “eHealth – making healthcare better for European citizens: An action plan for a European eHealth Area” (eH-AP), Member States of the Europ...

Biocomputational modelling as developed by the European Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) Initiative is the area of ICT most likely to revolutionise in the longer term the practice of medicine. Using the example of osteoporosis management, a socio-economic assessment framework is presented that captures how the transformation of clinical guidelines...

The European Union (EU) sponsored ARGOS project analysed current eHealth policy thinking in both the EU and the USA, compared strategic challenges and outcomes in selected fields, and drafted roadmaps towards developing advanced global approaches for these issues. This policy brief focuses on better understanding the benefits and costs of eHealth i...

In 2010 the ARGOS project was funded by the EC (DG RELEX) to contribute to the establishement of a "Transatlantic Observatory for meeting Global Health Policy Challenges through Information and Communication Technology-enabled solutions" to develop and promote common methods for responding to global eHealth challenges in the EU and the US. The Euro...

The European eHealth Strategies study analyzed policy development and strategy planning, implementation measures as well as progress achieved with respect to national and regional eHealth solutions in 34 European countries, with emphasis on barriers and enablers beyond technology. The focus was on infrastructure elements and selected solutions emph...

Key messages • Demographic change, rising incidence of chronic disease and unmet needs for more personalised care are trends that demand a new, integrated approach to health and social care. Professionals must work across sectors as a team with common goals and resources to deliver a coordinated response to each individual's care requirements. Adva...

The Emergency Care Summary (ECS) in Scotland provides essential clinical and demographic information about patients needing unscheduled or emergency care. Information about patients' medications, adverse drug reactions and allergies is transferred twice every day from GP systems to the ECS. Access is then available to authorised health-care profess...

While differences in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure in European general practices are decreasing more and more, actual use rates - in particular, for more advanced applications - are about as different as the languages spoken by GPs throughout the European Union. This is one finding of a representative survey among GP...

Financial sustainability is not a driving force of HealthGrids today, as a previous desk research survey of 22 international HealthGrid projects has showed. The majority of applications are project based, which puts a time limit of funding, but also of goals and objectives. Given this situation, we analysed two initiatives, WISDOM and MammoGrid fro...

The expansion of clinical information systems and the reduction in computing costs have led to an explosion of patient data available for reuse. However, this data is rarely combined and analyzed in an integrated manner. The DebugIT project is a large-scale integrating project funded within the 7th EU Framework Programme (FP7). The main objectives...

In integrative biomedical research, methods assessing the clinical or even socio-economic impact of more complex technologies such as Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-based tools for modelling and simulation of human physiology have rarely been applied. The EU funded Osteoporotic Virtual Physiological Human (VPHOP) research project, p...

The HealthGrid White Paper was published at the third annual conference in Oxford in 2005. Starting from the conclusions of the White Paper, the EU funded SHARE project (http://www.eu-share.org) has aimed at identifying the most important steps and significant milestones towards wide deployment and adoption of healthgrids in Europe. The project has...

IZIP is a Web-based health record system for the general population which has been used in the Czech Republic since 2004. The system provides access to medical data for health-care providers and clients; only the latter can authorise health-care professionals to view their data. We conducted a cost-benefit analysis of the system. There was a strong...

In 2003, a large German public health insurance fund launched the GesundheitsCard Europa (GCE) or Health Card Europe. Staff in the 14 participating hospitals along the Dutch and Belgium coast could use a multilingual Website to confirm immediately the insurance status of patients presenting a GCE. Reimbursement was speeded up by using the Web porta...

We conducted a cost benefit analysis of ten e-health applications in different European countries. All ten cases showed a positive economic impact - a sustainable net benefit. For the ten cases together, it would take four years for the present value of annual benefits to exceed the present value annual costs. The range was from 2 years (for telera...

This paper analyses key issues towards a research roadmap for eHealth-supported patient safety. The raison d'etre for research in this area is the high number of adverse patient events and deaths that could be avoided if better safety and risk management mechanisms were in place. The benefits that ICT applications can bring for increased patient sa...

Participatory methods can, in principle, be applied for a variety of purposes to gain insight into the context of use of an artefact or the way in which tasks are performed by end users. Consequently, participatory methods are equally valid for problem identification, clarification of the issues relevant to a particular topic, but also for the deta...

This scenario focuses on patients as users of Electronic Health Records (EHR) relevant information. The concrete field of applications is telemonitoring at home, a field where many new approaches and devices are showing up on the market in various countries, an indication of the perceived relevance and market potential of this type of patient invol...

Socio-economic trends including the ageing of populations in the developed world have let to markedly increased interest in improving society's ability to deliver effective care to older and chronically ill patients at home. The paper reports progress from recent European research on three key fronts faced in the diffusion of tele-homecare: Pilot a...

Objective: To evaluate the benefits of tele-homecare for chronically-ill patients and to ex-plore the application of advanced tele-homecare technology. Design: Prospective randomised controlled trial for patients with heart failure, pilot study for patients with renal failure and prototype trials with older patients for advanced systems solutions....

All industrial societies are ageing. This has profound socio-economic and health sector implications. Innovative services based on Information Society Technologies (IST), like telehomecare are regarded as promising avenues to follow both to allow (national) health systems to cope with these challenges and to improve the quality of life of chronical...

The objective of our research was to undertake first steps to analyse patient access to their electronic health records (EHR) as a crucial universal access issue: Why is patient involvement becoming a key issue, what approaches are available to learn more about patient attitudes and needs, which concrete outcomes can be obtained from such research?...

We have carried out a survey of elderly people in Europe relating to e-health and telemedicine issues. Telephone-based interview techniques were used in 13 countries and face-to-face interviews were used in Ireland and Portugal, where there are significant numbers of houses without telephones. Altogether 9661 interviews were performed. Most respond...

Home dialysis can improve the care and quality of life for patients with renal failure. We have explored the possibility of extending home care to more patients needing continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) using telemedicine. We tested videoconferencing support for five CAPD patients using low-cost ISDN equipment (128 kbit/s). Initial r...

Since 1991, 17 elderly persons (aged 75 to over 90) in 15 households have been connected via TV-videophones to a service centre. A standard CATV network was modified to support a reverse channel. This has been world-wide the first fully interactive broadband video communications project implemented in a real setting and operating over an extended p...

To foster the transition of Europe to the so-called information society, the Europen Commission through its Strucutral Funds established the InterRegional Information Society Initiative and funded strategic activities in 6 regions: Nord-Pas-de-Calais, North West England, Central Macedonia, Region of Piemonte, Free State of Saxony, Community of Vale...

The cultural determination of information behaviour is deeply influencing the way information is looked for, used and handled. Therefore, libraries in Central and Eastern Europe show, to a certain extent, the same characteristics due to the centralist information environment of the previous socialist rule. However, the deeply rooted belief in educa...

Since the opening up of the Soviet bloc countries, help given to libraries from the West has mainly taken the form of donation of material. It has been difficult for Western colleagues to appreciate the full extent of the problems experienced by their counterparts in the former Soviet bloc. The most pressing problems concerned library management. D...

To further the objectives of the IMPACT.2 (Information Market Policy Actions) programme of the Commission of the European Communities, this investigation was undertaken. There follows a description of the survey method, a brief characterisation on the information research in Europe, and some conclusions and suggestions regarding research netrworkin...

After a rather long gestation period of more than 10 years, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany presented in 1974 a comprehensive framework and concept for its information policy. After heavy attacks and criticism in the early 1980s, the plan was modified. A less ambitious, more market-oriented and pragmatic approach evolved. The appr...

The paper presents a critical and constructive review of German language literature. Mostly the publications focus on business econonucs aspects: library and information services as busmess units, management issues, procurement, produc tion, services. financing and charges, marketing. On the macro-economic level, questions like the government's res...

Staatliche Förderung von Wissenschaft und Forschung hat eine lange Tradition in Deutschland. Die Förderung des Mittelstandes ist ebenfalls seit langem konstanter Bestandteil der Wirt­schaftspolitik aller Regierungen. Als relevanter Promotor von Forschung, Entwicklung und Innovation finden kleine und mitt­lere Unternehmungen jedoch erst seit gut zeh...

Describes the regional direction of a common research and technology policy, and the framework and consequences of concrete experiences. States possible measures and regional projects. There are potential blocks to implementation. -D.J.Davis

This study analysed the experiences made in the USA regarding the impact of developing information and communication technologies and new media - like teletext, cable and interactive TV - on the press, in particular on newspapers. This was undertaken in view of the media-policy debate in the Federal Republic of Germany in the late 70’s, when it was...

In recent years most industrialised countries have been experiencing economic recessions, high unemployments rates, and changes in international trade flows to a degree unaccustomed since the Second World War. At the same time, new social demands have arisen to further strain available resources and require new solutions to satisfy them. In the pas...

The paper focuses on the international market for long-term debt capital. Based on Roll’s (1970) theory of equilibrium interest rates in an efficient bond market of a closed economy, we show that the term structure of interest rates in countries whose residents engage in in-ternational finical transactions are a function of domestic and foreign tra...

Some basic ideas of a model of the international term structure of interest rates are outlined. Based on Roll's (1970) theory of equilibrium interest rates in an efficient bond market of a closed economy, we show that the term structure of interest rates in countries whose residents engage in international financial transactions is a function of do...

Technological progress is a major factor chaping economic growth. Today's standard of living is a direct result of scientific advances and technical change in the past. Since uncontrolled technological progress has become amenace to our well­ being and may actually threat our survival, it is necessary to learn to manage technological progress and d...