e-Health innovation, if properly harnessed, will help address the fundamental and well-known challenges facing Europe’s healthcare systems – increasing demand due to demographic change, increasing demand for quality from informed and empowered patients and citizens and increasing demand for efficiency and financial sustainability.
The discourse at EU level by a whole range of stakeholders in recent years reflects this – the recent EU communication on telemedicine is an important call for action for more policy coherence, legal clarity and political will to accelerate efforts to create e-health solutions and inter-operability of technologies and systems across EU countries.
From a patient’s perspective, perhaps the most important dimension of the communication is the need to build confidence and trust in e-health solutions. The European Patients’ Forum sees huge potential for e-health as regards information for patients; patient-centred disease management; patient-healthcare professional dialogue; personalised healthcare; cross border mobility; quality and continuity of care and patient safety.
Patients must be involved in the development of e-health solutions if those solutions are to be of optimum value. And e-health will only work for individuals, society and the economy if there is appropriate recognition of:
• the ethical aspects of e-health: dignity, consent, confidentiality and privacy
• the e-health literacy needs of patients and health professionals.
These will certainly be among the important issues under discussion at the e-Health conference in Prague.
