Our first CCN Seminar is this week on Thursday, 21st, being held at the Global Centre for E-Health Innovation.

Register here: Disruptive Business Models for E-Health.

As the name suggests the headline theme of the session is to consider the potential impact of Cloud Computing on the traditional E-Health delivery model, and how it may be ‘disrupted’ via new technology and business models, and most importantly, what new Digital Economy building opportunities this presents for new entrepreneurs.

So our speaker line up is intended to describe some of the foundations that could make this possible, including the industry big picture, via Dennis Giokas, CTO for Canada Health Infoway – they’re responsible for the primary technical blueprints for E-Health in Canada, through to Mark Lapas, a Google Android developer expert, on how to create innovative new mobile apps.

Open Data and Accelerating Health Innovation in the Cloud

Another keynote speaker is Jury Konga, Principal of the eGovFutures Group.

Jury is a respected international speaker on Open Government, Open Data, e-Government and innovation.

Jury developed the Open Data Framework for Canada’s “G4” cities (Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Ottawa) and is currently assisting several other municipalities in developing Open Data and Open Government strategies.

He was recently appointed as an “Access by Design” Ambassador by Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner and sits on a national Open Data Research Advisory Council.

Open Data has acted as a catalyst for new application innovation models, enabling “citizen developers” to create new mobile apps in areas like transit and city planning, and Jury will explore how this effect might be replicated in Healthcare to unlock a similar innovation ecosystem.

E-Health as a Digital Economy foundation

In their Digital City Roadmap strategy a key aspect for New York City was that as well as publishing lots of Open Data for entrepreneurial developers to work with, they also supported this through their business development office, with a program of office space, financing and other mechanics required to engineer high-growth startups.

This combination of foundations is key to a thriving startup ecosystem, and we can do the same here in Canada, especially with industry-specific focus areas like E-Health.

This is a massive, massive sector with huge international growth markets like the USA and EU to tap into, and there are even similar entrepreneur support programs like EXCITE from MaRS.

As you’ll see these types of funding programs are intended to help accelerate new entrepreneurs where they can match both a technical innovation with a clear benefits business case for improving patient care.

The purpose of our seminar and our ongoing startup support program is to help entrepreneurs prepare their plans and technologies for these fast-tracking services.