Devlies, José

Abstract:

Healthcare is a very complex "enterprise", heavily depending on "information" and with a large number of stakeholders and a large variation of healthcare organisational frameworks all over the union. Healthcare is on the other hand not just another profit oriented business. Investing in e-Health can be very dangerous for SMEs considering the imperative cooperation between all the stakeholder to create a favourable context for business development.

Missing links, prerequisites for a mature and profit enabling business development in the EEA, were discovered during the C³ project (Comprehensive Continuity of Care - eTen C27778) and the e-ProLearn project (eTen C27976). C³ defined a methodology to define the maturity of e-Health services enabling an SME to focus its investment on the most promising services.

The author identified, based on the evolution of the EHR in the Union, four important prerequisites to create a profit enabling context for e-Health services.

All stakeholders, industry, authorities, users and science, has to cooperate on an equal basis, may be through National e-Health Institute.

A high performance e-Health backbone should be available to all the parties involved with a single point of access.

Appropriate authentication, authorisation, data reference services and (patient) master indexes services should be "available"

The main challenge to realise e-Health for everyone remains nevertheless the content. The future will be content driven, not technology driven. This means that there may be a need for a European e-HealthContent programme.