Telecare eNewsletter March 2016

Welcome to the March 2016 newsletter from the Telecare Learning and Improvement Network.

Our news service has been available since October 2005. Our Housing LIN and Telecare LIN membership database exceeds 40,000 people from around the world.

From January 2016 we are now back with a monthly Telecare LIN roundup as well as maintaining weekly headlines together with daily news via Twitter (follow @clarkmike and #TLINnews).

As in the past, we will be continuing to bring you an extensive curated coverage of digital health and technology enabled care references from the UK and around the world including telehealth, telecare, mobile health, telemedicine, ehealth, smart home technologies and Internet of Things. We will also be including more in the future on health informatics (including electronic health and care records), big data, artificial intelligence as well as health and care robotics.

The Department of Health and Office of Life Sciences are (again) getting interested in how technologies could be adopted by adult care self-funders - will we see a better plan this time that can help raise awareness of the wide range of health and care technologies that are now available in the UK to support self-management and maintaining independence? Sir Bruce Keogh has officially opened the new Technology Enabled Care Studio at City University to help train future health and care professionals in the use of assistive technologies - hopefully this will help improve knowledge and understanding in the workforce. A year has now passed since the first NHS vanguard sites were announced. Obtaining details of their use of technology to support new care models is not easy - look out for coverage in next month's newsletter. We will also be monitoring the 85 digital roadmaps and 44 Sustainability and Transformation Plans in England to see how digital technology is being covered in addition to the new NHS seven testbed sites. Technology and housing was covered at the recent Housing LIN conference (summary and presentations now available). What are Echo, Dot and Tap and could they become virtual assistants? (read the article). Finally, we have hundreds of links carefully selected from around 2000 added this month.

Upcoming events include eHealth Week in April, TSA Summit in May, Financial Times digital health in June, the Digital Health and Care Congress in July as well as three events from RSM over the coming weeks.