Now is the ideal moment to look back on what we achieved at COCIR in the past few months. In June, COCIR and eight partners launched the Integrated Care Alliance and published a Joint Call for Action during an event at the European Parliament hosted by MEP Michal Boni. Meanwhile, COCIR continues to strengthen its collaboration with multiple key stakeholders, be present at various strategic events and to focus on key matters.

At the European Level, and more specifically in 2016 we published a number of papers on strategic topics linked to Digital Health, aimed at providing the industry opinion toward EU Institutions and key partners. Topics included cloud computing, interoperability, mHealth, Integrated Care workflows and Big Data Analytics. The final two papers were launched at our 3rd Annual COCIR eHealth Summit, which took place in Brussels on 8 December. This took place under the umbrella of the European Commission’s European Summit on Digital Innovation for Active and Healthy Ageing, with COCIR as a privileged partner of the European Commission during that week. COCIR is also a Champion of the Blueprint, launched by European Commission together with other champions. We will continue our work supporting this great initiative both during 2017 and beyond.

At the COCIR Summit, high-level speakers and participants shared their insights on the value of digital health in supporting integrated and patient-centric care and discussed the challenges of measuring the impact of digital health innovation and related services. We were also honoured to welcome Vytenis Andriukaitis, European Commissioner Health and Food Safety to our Summit. His opening speech is available here. All presentations and photos of the event can be accessed here.

At international level, and under the DITTA umbrella, we organised a dedicated session at the 2016 World Cancer Congress, which took place in Paris on 2 November focusing on “The Role of Medical Technologies in Integrated Cancer Care”. More info is available here.

As we lead the united global industry voice on medical imaging radiotherapy and health ICT, we also used the opportunity of the International Day of Radiology on 8 November to share COCIR’s most recent findings on the installed base of medical imaging equipment in Europe. Our report shows that the installed base is now older than ever before, and that the overall density of equipment in Western Europe is declining.

Finally, we want to wish you a wonderful Christmas and a Happy and Healthy New Year in 2017, which will be full of additional communications that we look forward to sharing with all of you!

Nicole Denjoy

23 December 2016