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Abstract:
People around the world have a common interest: They want to stay as healthy as possible throughout their lifetime and, if they do become sick or injured, they want to return to health quickly. The aim of all healthcare participants is to help fulfil this goal. However, there is a growing need to do so more efficiently. Simply stated: the quality of care must continue to increase and its cost must decrease. And this must be accomplished in a patient-centred healthcare system (where patients' needs and values guide all decisions), throughout the healthcare continuum (from prevention/early detection, to diagnosis, to therapy, and to rehabilitation).
The main levers to fulfil this are technological innovation and process optimisation.
Innovative eHealth solutions help coordinate and integrate clinical and administrative processes. They provide a backbone to healthcare processes, driving the availability of the right information at the right place at the right time. This is not theory. Powerful eHealth solutions are already achieving impressive results. For example, greatly reduced report turnaround times mean less waiting for patients and digital patient files dramatically increase safety by practically eliminating incorrect or inaccurate prescriptions.
eHealth will also be crucial in the future. For example, the integration of medical data, including information from genomics and proteomics studies, in data warehouses with application of data mining technologies will be essential in enabling knowledge-driven healthcare.
And, not to forget: Healthcare is our largest economic factor. It accounts for 10% of the European workforce and about 8.6% of GDP in EU-15.
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