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HIMSS & Health 2.0 European Conference

HIMSS & Health 2.0 European conference took place on 11-13.6.2019 in Helsinki. 3 000 professionals met in Messukeskus. Medaffcon was also present in the Finnish Pavilion area.

The themes and topics of the event were carefully curated and concentrated on five key themes: health & care, aging, data, AI, and innovation. The conference offered a great amount of talks and discussions surrounding the chosen themes. All themes were also well represented on the Finnish Pavilion area, a Finnish country specific area where Finnish companies’ booths were situated. Our expert, Maija Wolf, had the honor to be the first to talk about the topic of Real-World evidence (RWE) on the Finnish pavilion arena. She was demonstrating how RWE can be used to advance patient-centric, effective and economically sustainable healthcare. The presentation included concrete examples of Medaffcon’s RWE studies. Attendees visiting our booth area were able to discuss the topic and RWE study possibilities further with our experts.

Results of the HIMSS Helsinki Health Index survey

During the conference, we wanted to demonstrate how easily real-world evidence data can be collected and analyzed. Everyone who visited our booth was able to take part in a short 7 question survey. The survey questions included the respondent’s age and gender,how active they are, what is their main way of commuting, how many cups of coffee they drink during a day, have they taken a flu vaccination, and how many hours of sleep they get per night. Respondents were then able to compare their own results with other visitors’ answers and the FinTerveys 2017 study results. Our aim was to get the attendees to realize the power of data: very little data can be analyzed and compared in many ways. The survey attracted a lot of interest and we would like to thank everyone who took part in the survey. We have summarized the findings of the survey below.

Demographic information and commuting

We had 61 responses to our survey and 67 % of the respondents were male. The mean age of the respondents was 37 years, but there was a very high number of responses with the age 18 (see figure 1). There are two possible reasons for this discrepancy in the age distribution: either the respondents did not want to reveal their age, or they forgot to change the default age of 18 in the questionnaire. The most common way of commuting was by car (51 % of respondents, see figure 2), and the other modes of transportation were equally popular among the respondents.

Figure 1: Age distribution of the respondents.
Figure 2: Modes of commuting.

Flu vaccination, activity and sleep

59 % of the respondents had taken the flu vaccination last winter, whereas in the FinTerveys 2017 study this percentage was only 39 %. Furthermore, the survey respondents did an average of 4.2 hours of sports per week, which is almost 2 hours more per week than the 2.5 hours reported in the FinTerveys 2017 study (see figure 3). This could indicate that the participants at a Health exhibition are more health-oriented than the average Finn. The average amount of sleep per night for our respondents was just under 7 hours, whereas the average in the FinTerveys study was 7 hours and 21 minutes (see figure 4).

Figure 3: For the survey respondents, the average amount of sports per week was 4.2 hours. The average from the FinTerveys 2017 study is shown in blue.
Figure 4: The respondents slept an average of 6.97 hours per night, which is less than the average Finn according to the FinTerveys 2017 study.

How many cups of coffee do you drink?

According to the International Coffee Organization, Finland is the world leader in coffee consumption with Finns consuming 12 kg of coffee per person per year, amounting to approximately 4 cups of coffee per day. The survey respondents drank an average of 2.7 cups of coffee per day, and men seemed to drink more coffee than women (see figure 5).


Figure 5: The amount of coffee consumer per day. The average was 2.7 cups per day.

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