Editorial - October 2020

Dear members of the ESC Working Group on e-Cardiology,

It is with great pleasure that I send you an update on the activities of our working group (WG) along with a selection of recommended readings on various topics. I feel truly honored to serve as the chair of your WG that covers a unique expertise that is rapidly gaining interest in cardiology, both from a clinical and a basic science point of view. I am a clinical electrophysiologist and the fields of my interest in digital health are remote monitoring of implantable devices and e-learning. Both of them are gaining more and more importance during these unprecedented times of social distancing because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The latter has significantly affected, actually cancelled, all our in-person European meetings.
However, the ESC Congress 2020 proved to be an outstanding Digital Experience, a record-breaking event that opened ongoing conversation in ESC Cardio Talk and Social Media. Among all the interesting and important sessions on digital health, we note the WG awards given to the two top-ranked abstracts on the e-Cardiology topic. Congratulations to Marinka Oudkerk Pool, Tina Stegmann and their respective groups for the excellent abstracts on e-Cardiology.
We would like to inform you that the Digital Summit 2020 was being transformed into the Digital Health Week 2020, a fully online event over four days, from Monday 30 November to Thursday 3 December. The event will have free registration, open to all healthcare professionals, and proposing educational content, discussions and interviews.
The European Heart Journal – Digital Health (EHJ-DH) is a recently launched Open Access, peer-reviewed journal, with a specific focus on digital health in cardiovascular medicine, connecting physicians, researchers, and allied health professionals. The journal advances excellence in digital health through the publication of high-quality original preclinical and clinical research, reviews, points of view, images and short reports. The journal also provides continuing education in digital health topics through its teaching series. The European Heart Journal – Digital Health is an official journal of the ESC that is affiliated to the ESC WG on e-Cardiology and is currently overseen by the ESC Digital Health Committee. Submissions online.

Also, we witnessed a very successful Computing in Cardiology (CinC) conference that was organised in a unique, hybrid format with attendants and speakers online and onsite in Rimini, Italy. Like every year, we awarded the Computational needs Translational Award (CTA), a joint ESC-CinC award for the promotion of clinical translation of computational cardiology research. Hereby, I congratulate this year’s winning team represented at CinC2020 by Dr. Sara Moccia.

On behalf of the entire WG Nucleus I wish you all the best,

Polychronis Dilaveris, MD, PhD, FESC
Chairperson ESC WG on e-Cardiology 2020-2022

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