IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Investing in a state-of-the-art communications system can also boost patient and staff satisfaction and deliver value for money, a pilot project has shown.

Overall, the use of ICT in health care has clear benefits, but doctors and patients need to be engaged from the start and politicians must be more supportive if progress is to be made, concluded speakers at a meeting on eHealth yesterday (22 June) in the European Parliament.

Health-EU – the European health portal covering a vast range of health topics, is now available in 20 European languages at http://health.europa.eu. The portal was first launched in May 2006 by the European Commission's Directorate General for Health and Consumer Affairs, and is a ‘one stop shop’ for Europeans wanting to find out what’s happening across a broad range of health issues in their own countries and across Europe. Initially available only in English, it can now be accessed in 20 different official European languages. Health-EU  is aimed at everybody interested in health, as well as healthcare professionals, scientists and policy makers.

The languages available are now: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

The ability to move freely between Member States is one very concrete outcome of greater union in Europe. But with mobility comes potential insecurity. What happens if I get sick on holidays in Italy? Is insurance reciprocal when I work abroad in the EU? How is the hospital bill processed?

Facilitating access to healthcare, regardless of location, means doctors now have better access to the medical records of patients. Crucially, this enables immediate access to test results from the laboratory, and prescriptions can be delivered directly to pharmacists.

Seven years after setting out its ‘ehealth Action Plan’ the European Commission is proclaiming Europe as a world leader in applying ehealth to make healthcare more convenient, effective and efficient.

However, the Commission also acknowledges that Europe “still has a long way to go” to reap the full benefits of ehealth, and now the recession threatens to undermine progress to date. Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Digital Agenda says the ageing population and a shortage of healthcare staff will lead to increased pressure on healthcare, at a time where European governments are facing budget austerity. “The challenge is to do more with less, in which information technology is a key enabler for delivering more effective, efficient and patient-oriented health care,” Kroes says.

The industry believes that telehealth solutions must be developed at EU and national level to help combat growing financial and staff shortages in the European health sector.

However, it highlights several weaknesses within the current legal systems. COCIR, an industry group representing the healthcare IT sector, has called on the European Commission and member states to establish a single legal framework to overcome problems such as licensing, liability and cross-border jurisdiction.

Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner for the digital agenda, has called for “radical changes” to increase the use of technology in healthcare to prevent a “guaranteed collapse” of health systems.

Kroes called on the telecommunications industry to enter the ‘e-health' market so that patients can get access to medical records online, monitor their own health using mobile devices and communicate more easily with their doctors.

The report, 'eHealth priorities and strategies in European countries', praises Member States for the steps they have taken since committing themselves to implementing the priorities of the 2004 European e-Health Action Plan.

Under traditional health service provision, patients, sometimes with mobility issues, have to travel to a clinic or hospital, or, conversely, health care providers have to travel to see the patient. Obviously, mobile eHealth provision, where no one has to go anywhere, can potentially be much more efficient. Nevertheless, the establishment, acceptance and use of mobile eHealth services is still not widespread.

The European Commission has launched a consultation on the barriers to the large-scale deployment of electronic healthcare systems and the actions needed to overcome them as it prepares its 2012-2020 eHealth Action Plan.

This is intended to build on the first such action plan (IP/04/580), which was launched in 2004.

The 'Health in Europe: Information and Data Interface' (Heidi) site - currently available in wiki beta version - is intended to be a one stop-shop on health information and data concerning such topics as health status, determinants, diseases, health systems, trends, institutional and policy aspects.

The 2.3 million project, entitled ‘Implementing Transnational Telemedicine Solutions’ (ITTS), aims to deliver a range of projects on mobile self management, video consultation and home-based health services to the rural and remote communities of northern Europe.

This week, research partner teams from Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden and Finland will gather at NUI Galway for a two-day meeting. The ITTS teams and their respective clinicians, speech therapists, researchers, engineers and technologists work in a variety of fields including psychiatry, emergency services, diabetes, rehabilitation and care of the elderly.

87 Prozent der Allgemeinmediziner in Europa verwenden einen Computer und 48 Prozent verfügen über einen Breitbandanschluss, so eine heute veröffentlichte Umfrage der Europäischen Kommission. In Bezug auf Verfügbarkeit und Nutzung gibt es in Europa jedoch noch große Unterschiede.

The financial and economic crisis has led EU member states to make several cuts in the health sector, compromising patient outcomes from a quality and safety perspective. It therefore takes new innovative ways of thinking to re-engineer the healthcare system.

Of course there are overlaps between eGovernment and eHealth. One of these is a basic, sensible but central requirement for all relevant procedures: proper, secure and easy to handle identification and authentication, that can be applied also in cross border services. The two Large Scale Pilots STORK and epSOS, both co- funded by Member States and the EU-commission, are working on this issue, making proposals on what are the common requirements, what the differences are and how to secure that future developments are not running in diverse directions.

eHealth and telemedicine are certainly emerging as possible tools to provide high quality, affordable care in an ageing Europe, agreed the participants.

Unlike its fellow affixees, e-health is rather difficult to define. It refers not to a thing or a single practice, but to a series of trends in healthcare that owe their existence to the emergence of new communication technologies, in particular the Internet.

One is telemedicine - the provision of clinical healthcare from a distance.

The "right" e-health standards for specific applications and examples of their concrete use are also lacking, reveals the study, requested by the European Commission.