Cape Town 2009, British Publishers' flagship eStrategies event encouraging global dialogue, took place last November, finishing on Thursday, November 19 with a critical day of discussion focused on South Africa's ICT Strategies for Health, the lessons learnt from similar programmes around the world and strategies for the successful integration and deployment of eHealth and mHealth solutions in African countries.

Organised in partnership with Dr Shaheen Khotu, CIO at the Department of Health in South Africa, the discussion panel and high-level audience included Dr James O Gesami, Deputy Minister of Health and Sanitation in Kenya, Dr Stella Anyangwe from the World Health Organisation and Dr Joseph Amuzu, the eHealth coordinator from the Commonwealth Secretariat and government.

Key to the success of the discussion, however, was the vendor participation, which involved representation from many of the biggest global systems developers and integrators including IBM, BT, CISCO, Accenture, Waymark IT, Open Text, Philips, Oasis Medical Solutions, EMC and Oracle as well as local solutions providers from South Africa, like Allegra and GeoMed Ltd.

A full analysis of the debate will appear on this website in December, as well as interviews with the participants and a transcript of the discussions.

The eHealth day was the last of four highly successful days in this year's Cape Town eStrategies event, which included sessions focusing on:

Representatives from more than 50 leading companies joined in the debates, which took place in the beautiful surroundings of Cape Town's Bishopsgrace, an intimate venue, chosen to encourage the open exchange of ideas and successful networking.

All days brought together panels and audience of senior public and private sector figures, all looking at developing successful partnerships that not only help integrate much-needed technology into African countries to tackle many of the challenges that exist, but lead to real business.

A number of delegates left the conference ready to follow up on the contacts made and develop successful relationships and implementations.

Further analysis and pictures from the event will follow shortly.