Visiting Vitalis conference in Sweden

I feel short visiting our Dutch customers, so I spent the whole day looking up at my giant hosts in Sweden’s Vitalis conference . This is the largest Nordic health care IT conference and it’s interesting seeing how they organise their care. Their medical records procurements are regional, not by care setting. The market leader is Swedish Cambio Group, not a US company. And Cambio and Better store data primarily in OpenEHR’s open source schemas, not a proprietary format. 

I also interviewed some fascinating people on behalf of Healthcare World!

Maria Lindqvist had a near-fatal anaphylactic reaction. Her care and therefore her record is spread across three regions. So when one emergency department gave her too much adrenaline, she had a stroke and a blood clot in her lungs. “I was dying but I have survived and I thought oh I must do something”. 

So she did 🙂 She set up HSVN. The charity is a meeting place to address patient needs and includes a wide array of stakeholders such as politicians, regional and municipal authorities, healthcare personnel, scientists, educational institutions, pharmacies, medtech companies, and 129 patient organizations. The latter inform a patient needs database that is then used in meetings to find solutions, connecting those with needs to those with solutions. She did all this in just three years.

Elina Broman co-wrote a book about medical device certification! I’m slowly reading it using Google Lens as it’s in Swedish, it’s quite enjoyable. Elina’s background is in medical and civil engineering. She and her colleagues started the MTPodden podcast. They educate medical engineers about medical device topics such as regulation, standards, and how devices work.

Last is a photo from my plane’s window before we landed in Gothenburg, the city of the conference. A very enjoyable visit.