Northern Ireland’s top health official is visiting Boston this week, meeting with lawmakers and health leaders and mentioning to IT firms that his home province is “ideal for innovation."
Northern Ireland Health Minister Edwin Poots, a large proponent of mobile health, is speaking at the EU/US eHealth Marketplace and the Partners Connected Health Symposium, along with other health officials and IT executives from the U.K., Ireland and the European Union.
“This visit offers us an excellent opportunity to bring closer the day when everyone who needs to access high-tech care in their homes can do so,” Poots said in a prepared statement.
Originally a farmer from outside Belfast, Poots was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1998 and became health minister in 2011. He has since led a number of healthcare investment projects in hospital construction, IT and mobile health, all amid Europe’s sovereign debt crisis.
"Northern Ireland offers a unique model,” Poots told the Belfast Telegraph. "It is a single integrated health and social care system. Therefore, it provides an ideal test-bed for any company to develop innovative initiatives and products."
In 2011, Poots helped launch a £18 million ($28 million) mobile health project that’s aimed to have about 20,000 patients by 2017 self-reporting and managing chronic conditions from home, with the data automatically uploaded to providers. The project is being implemented by a consortium of U.K. and Irish firms,Turnstall Healthcare, Fold Telecare and S3 Group.
And following successful electronic health record pilots at the Belfast City Hospital and the Ulster Hospital, Poots’ agency recently started a project aimed at bringing EHRs to all of Northern Ireland’s general practitioners by April 2013. The contract with Orion Health is worth £9 million (about $14.4 million) over the next seven years.
[See also: ONC to survey exchange between physicians and labs]
A U.K. province separate from Ireland, Northern Ireland is home to about 1.8 million people and also home to dozens of small tech firms and also larger investment from Fujitsu, Openwave and Microsoft. Northern Ireland is a sort of a “secret IT bubble” Computer Weekly wrote in August, wondering if the province “could rise upward and command global attention creating jobs and innovation.”
Somewhat like Ireland, Northern Ireland has drawn tech firms large and small with skilled coders coming from academic research centers, government subsidies and investment projects and a cost of living much cheaper than London or Silicon Valley.
Mobile health, or remote health as it’s called more often in the U.K., applied to long-term care is something Poots and other health officials have emphasized. About 75 percent of Northern Ireland residents over the age of 75 have chronic diseases and about 70 percent of the province’s health and social care budget is associated with spending on chronic diseases, according to the province's health department.
