By Dr Hrvoje Budincevic
The ESO EAST Steering Committee organised the ESO EAST Meeting, supported by the ESO EAST Head Office.
The 11th Annual ESO-EAST Meeting was organised on 20 May 2025, traditionally as a pre-conference meeting, a day before ESOC 2025 in Helsinki, Finland. It gathered representatives from ESO EAST countries, the ESO EAST Steering Committee, ANGELS Initiative representatives, the RES-Q Team, the ESO Head Office, industry partners, and guests.
After welcome notes from Robert Mikulik and Veronika Svobodova, Cristina Tiu, the new ESO EAST Steering Committee Chair, gave a speech, which was followed by the speech of Adam Kobayashi, the new Vice Chair. Both of them shared their vision of the future of the ESO EAST programme. The new Steering Committee members are also introduced: Anita Arsovska, Dmytro Lebedynets, Michael Karlinski, Alexander Tsiskaridze, and Aleksandras Vilionskis. The formed ESO EAST Council includes previous ESO EAST Steering Committee members and serves as an advisory body, without a voting option. This year, we were again honoured by participating in the ESO president, Simona Sacco, who presented the perspective of the ESO EAST programme in the ESO community. Robert Mikulik showed the latest data from the RES-Q registry regarding ESO EAST countries’ performance, focusing on intracerebral hemorrhage quality measures. Ten selected countries showed their best practices – Armenia, Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Slovenia, and Ukraine.
The afternoon session started with Robert Mikulik (former ESO EAST Chair) and Hamzah Ziadeh presenting novel futures of the RES-Q registry. The registry uses virtual assistants for physicians and patients and a discharge report composer to harmonise patients’ summaries. Axel Kohlmetz presented updates and plans for stroke rehabilitation training programmes.
This year, we had two workshops. The first, led by Natan Bornstein and Veronika Svobodova, was related to the ESO EAST goals and key performance indicators for the next time period, from 2025 to 2030. Discussions included KPIs such as quality monitoring, community, education/training, visibility of ESO EAST, young generation engagement, and cooperation with ESO Committees. This section included an update on research papers. The other workshop, led by Hamzah Ziadeh, was related to virtual assistants for clinicians.
Discussions were conducted in an amicable and constructive atmosphere, as has been practiced for all these years.
We extend our sincere thanks to Robert Mikulík for his outstanding leadership and dedication as Chair of ESO EAST. We are truly grateful for his work and proud to have his expertise at the heart of this important initiative.
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