Proposal Submission upon VIScon Call for Proposals

This is an accepted proposal for a talk at this conference:

VIScon Symposium, 10th to 12th October 2025, ETH Zurich

Date of this talk:
11th October 2025

Place:
ETH Hauptgebäude (HG):
HG building at ETH, Rämistrasse 101, 8006 Zurich.

Info:
VIScon, ETH Zurich

Abstract

Ever Rising Health Cost: What Can ICT and Automation (Not) Achieve?

Sub: Socratic irony: Expensive IT in healthcare, just what we needed.

Summary: Does ICT make our health system more efficient or cheaper? Cost and political pressure sometimes seem to have the opposite effect: expensive endeavours, inefficiency, false expectations, answers in search of questions. Fortunately, not always. A brief look at a few unspectacular IT projects from my practice may illustrate this. Let’s compare with a well-known, public lighthouse project, the Electronic Patient Record (EPR/EHR).

Description: If sensitive public funds are being used, unrealistic objectives and goals are probably not desirable. With regard to computing in healthcare, are there general criteria for good, effective, cost-efficient projects? And secondly, could computing, automation and data analytics be generally beneficial in healthcare?
Real illustrative projects as well as the public EPR project could provide pointers, even if they are not representative.

Profile: Robert has many years of ICT experience in healthcare and other industries. He also specialises in security & ICT strategy at his own consultancy wuergler-it.ch. Co-founder of the “Cyber and Digital Economy Research Network”.

Presentation

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Falls vorgesehen sind die Präsentationen bzw. sind die Dokumente der Konferenz-Vorträge nach dem Vortragsdatum bei der Veranstalterin oder hier verfügbar.