• Siemens Healthineers eHealth Solutions¹ will network healthcare facilities in Switzerland
• Electronic patient record enables secure access to patient data

To expand its portfolio in the area of eHealth, Swiss Post will make use of the Siemens Healthineers eHealth Solutions1 in the future. The eHealth solution offered by Swiss Post, which includes the electronic patient record, will provide secure networking between patients and players in the healthcare industry. Working in partnership with Siemens Healthineers will enable Swiss Post to provide new eHealth services for its customers.
Siemens Healthineers has already put a number of major eHealth projects in place in Europe, including a large proportion of the electronic health record in Austria. In this case, eHealth Solutions assists physicians, hospitals, care facilities, and pharmacists with accessing important healthcare data relating to their patients. There are also further projects in Denmark, Spain and Germany.
The electronic patient record makes it possible to consult patient data regardless of time and place. Patients can decide for themselves who in the healthcare continuum can access their medical documents and data, e.g. discharge reports, x-rays, medication summaries, or details of allergies. In Switzerland, electronic patient records are maintained locally rather than centrally. They are made available via regional, organizational groupings of facilities, like hospitals, rest homes, medical practices, pharmacies, or rehabilitation clinics.² As a leading provider of a complete solution to network players in Switzerland’s healthcare sector, Swiss Post serves as a professional partner to the country’s Cantons (federal states).
Swiss Post’s eHealth solution is tailored to the special characteristics and peculiarities of Switzerland’s healthcare market, which includes seamlessly integrating a range of IT systems.
Siemens Healthineers eHealth Solutions contain components needed to share medical data securely between facilities. Siemens Healthineers not only provides the software but also the expertise to help with cooperative healthcare between practice-based physicians and hospitals, for example. The solution is scalable and ranges from networking different departments within a hospital to networking entire regions and countries. Siemens Healthineers eHealth Solutions can also be used with heterogeneous and changing IT infrastructure.
“Making relevant healthcare data available exactly where it is needed is the basis for a lasting improvement to healthcare,” says Arthur Kaindl, Head of Digital Products, Siemens Healthineers. “All the players involved must first be digitally networked, to enable the patient to be considered comprehensively and thus achieve a better diagnosis and reach better treatment decisions. We’re looking forward to working with Swiss Post on this project.”
Siemens Healthineers eHealth Solutions is a product of ITH Icoserve technology for healthcare GmbH, Innsbruck, Austria, a subsidiary of Siemens Healthineers.
¹ _{eHealth products from Siemens Healthineers are not commercially available in all countries. Please contact your local Siemens Healthineers sales representative for the most current information.}
² _{Source: https://www.post.ch/en/business/a-z-of-subjects/industry-solutions/industry-solution-healthcare/patient-record}

A recent study conducted at the University of Tampere, Tampere University of Technology, Pirkanmaa Hospital District and Fimlab in Finland has concluded that an electronic nose (eNose) can be used to identify the most common bacteria causing soft-tissue infections.
The eNose can be used to detect the bacteria without the prior preparation of samples, and the system was capable of differentiating methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) from methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA).
Skin and soft-tissue infections are common diseases that need medical treatment. Their diagnosis is usually based on bacterial cultures, but in uncomplicated cases the diagnosis may be made directly based on the clinical presentation of the disease. However, this may lead to empirical antibiotic treatments, i.e. treatments without a specific diagnosis, which may result in longer treatment times, adverse effects and increased costs.
“Our aim was to create a method for the rapid diagnosis of soft tissue infections. If we had such a method, treatment could be started in a timely manner and targeted to the relevant pathogen directly. This would reduce the need for empirical treatments and shorten diagnostic delays,” says doctoral researcher Taavi Saviauk from the faculty of medicine and life sciences at the University of Tampere.
“The portable eNose device we used does not require laboratory conditions or special training, so it is well suited for outpatient use. The results of this study are a significant step towards our goal,” Saviauk continues.
An electronic nose is a device that produces “an olfactory profile” for each molecular compound in the air. The results are analysed by a computer and the system is programmed to differentiate between different compounds.
The research group conducting the study has previously shown how an eNose can be successfully used to differentiate prostate cancer from benign prostatic hyperplasia using a urine sample and distinguish between the various bacteria that cause urinary tract infections.
Infection Controlhttps://tinyurl.com/y8bwvxmf

The amount of close and comforting contact between infants and their caregivers can affect children at the molecular level, an effect detectable four years later, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute.
The study showed that children who had been more distressed as infants and had received less physical contact had a molecular profile in their cells that was underdeveloped for their age – pointing to the possibility that they were lagging biologically.
Although the implications for childhood development and adult health have yet to be understood, this finding builds on similar work in rodents. This is the first study to show that in humans the simple act of touching, early in life, has deeply-rooted and potentially lifelong consequences on the epigenome — biochemical changes that affect gene expression.
“In children, we think slower epigenetic aging could reflect less favourable developmental progress,” said Michael Kobor, a Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics who leads the “Healthy Starts” theme at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute.
The study involved 94 healthy children in British Columbia. Researchers from UBC and BC Children’s Hospital asked parents of 5-week-old babies to keep a diary of their infants’ behaviour (such as sleeping, fussing, crying or feeding) as well as the duration of caregiving that involved bodily contact. When the children were about 4 ½ years old, their DNA was sampled by swabbing the inside of their cheeks.
The team examined a biochemical modification called DNA methylation, in which some parts of the chromosome are tagged with small molecules made of carbon and hydrogen. These molecules act as “dimmer switches” that help to control how active each gene is, and thus affect how cells function.
The extent of methylation, and where on the DNA it specifically happens, can be influenced by external conditions, especially in childhood. These epigenetic patterns also change in predictable ways as we age.
Scientists found consistent methylation differences between high-contact and low-contact children at five specific DNA sites. Two of these sites fall within genes: one plays a role in the immune system, and the other is involved in metabolism. However, the downstream effects of these epigenetic changes on child development and health aren’t known yet.
The children who experienced higher distress and received relatively little contact had an “epigenetic age” that was lower than would be expected, given their actual age. A discrepancy between epigenetic age and chronological age has been linked to poor health in some recent studies.
“We plan to follow up on whether the ‘biological immaturity’ we saw in these children carries broad implications for their health, especially their psychological development,” says lead author Sarah Moore, a postdoctoral fellow. “If further research confirms this initial finding, it will underscore the importance of providing physical contact, especially for distressed infants.”

University of British Columbiahttps://tinyurl.com/y89od57l

Surgery to remove a part of the brain to give relief to patients with epilepsy doesn’t always result in complete seizure relief, but statisticians at Rice University have developed a method for integrating neuroimaging scans to identify patients at high risk of continued seizures before the surgery takes place.
Rice statistician Marina Vannucci and lead author Sharon Chiang, an M.D./Ph.D. student at Rice and Baylor College of Medicine, worked with colleagues at Baylor, the University of California at Irvine and UCLA to develop a method for integrating functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) scans to find visual biomarkers that distinguish patients with the greatest likelihood of benefit.
Their hope is that with recent alternatives to resective surgery, including responsive neurostimulation, vagus nerve stimulation and thalamic stimulation, patients with temporal lobe epilepsy(TLE) can avoid anterior temporal lobe resection surgery that may not help them, or can undergo other procedures that are more likely to benefit them.
Vannucci and Chiang built their model on data gathered from PET and resting-state fMRI scans for a total of 51 patients by the UCLA Seizure Disorder Center between 2007 and 2012. The centre worked with Rice and Baylor to investigate suspicions that failure to attain seizure freedom after resection of the anterior temporal lobe in some patients with TLE originates in tissue connected through networks to the lobe.
Standard resection of the anterior temporal lobe cures or dramatically reduces seizures for many who undergo the surgery, but approximately 30 to 50 percent of patients continue to experience seizures after surgery.
Vannucci and Chiang previously used statistical techniques to analyse brain activity data from patients with epilepsy and control groups to gain new information about active networks in the brain. “We have been tackling this problem of trying to understand temporal lobe epilepsy from different angles,” said Vannucci, a professor and chair of Rice’s Department of Statistics.
This time, she said, they used the data to demonstrate that the recurrence of seizures after surgery, despite resection of the seizure-onset zone, may be due to either surgical disruption of fibres connected to previously normal brain tissue or incomplete resection of an epileptogenic network.
Their results identified a subgroup of patients with 5.8 times greater odds of experiencing postoperative seizures due to what the researchers suspect are differences in their underlying brain networks.
They suggested the occurrence of postoperative seizures could be due to remaining epilepsy networks after surgery. “This may lead us to better understand the brain networks that produce epilepsy and allow for the design of better treatments for those patients who do not have seizure freedom from the current operation,” said Dr. John Stern, a co-author and professor of clinical neurology, director of the epilepsy clinical programme and co-director of the Seizure Disorder Center at UCLA.
Rice Universityhttps://tinyurl.com/y9jd8q66

Friday, 16 March 2018

• Shares of Healthineers surged more than 6 percent during morning deals, with the listing likely to galvanize the mood among other pending German floatations.
• The initial public offering (IPO) of Healthineers marked one of Germany’s biggest listings in recent years and one of the largest European IPOs in 2018.
• "It is a great moment for us, we are happy about the confidence investors have put in us," Bernd Montag, CEO of Siemens Healthineers, told CNBC on Friday.

The medical equipment unit of German engineering firm Siemens began trading on the country’s stock exchange Friday.
Shares of Siemens Healthineers surged more than 6 percent during morning deals, with the listing likely to galvanize the mood among other pending German flotations.
"It is a great moment for us, we are happy about the confidence investors have put in us," Bernd Montag, CEO of Siemens Healthineers, told CNBC Friday.
The initial public offering (IPO) of Healthineers marked one of Germany’s biggest listings in recent years and one of the largest European IPOs in 2018.
Issued at 28 euros apiece, shares of the company opened at 29.10 euros on Friday. However, the IPO was delayed.
When asked whether the delay to Healthineers’ stock market debut had been a source of frustration, Montag replied: "No, we have been on the journey to this day for basically three years … We had very great moments and challenging moments on this journey so half an hour at the home stretch didn’t make a big difference and we are happy that we made it anyway."
The offer price was seen by some investors as a climb-down by Siemens in order to create heightened interest in the issue. Despite previous valuations of closer to 35 billion euros, Healthineers’ equity is valued at 28 billion euros.
Siemens is selling a 15 percent stake in the world’s biggest maker of medical imaging equipment. The move is designed to help the company raise its own funds for future takeovers and investments as well as bolstering its standalone value.
Several major banks acted as global coordinators to help the IPO take place Friday with Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan all involved in the listing.
Several large German IPOs are pending, with DWS scheduled for next week. Meanwhile, SpringerNature, HSE24, Takko and Godewind are all expected to follow over the coming weeks. CNBC.com