This booklet highlights some of the many EU initiatives and co-funded research and innovation projects which address societal challenges through digital innovation, such as better healthcare, independent living for the elderly, delivering effective public services, energy saving, smart transport, secure internet, inclusion, preservation of cultural heritage.

This is a study on the Analysis of the Needs for Cross-Border Services and Assessment of the Organisational, Legal, Technical and Semantic Barriers. The Malmö Declaration on eGovernment, the European eGovernment Action Plan 2011-2015 and the Poznan Ministerial eGovernment Conference all emphasized the importance of cross-border services for achieving socio-economic prosperity and sustainable public services. According to the Digital Agenda for Europe, Member States would discuss and agree on a common list of key cross-border public services. The Study on the Analysis of the Needs for Cross-Border Services and Assessment of the Organisational, Legal, Technical and Semantic Barriers supports the European Commission and the Member States in validating the key cross-border public services with the highest impact that should be deployed; identify the barriers that need to be overcome; point to the potential benefits of the cross-border public services implementation; and provide scenarios for a discussion on if and how these services could be implemented by 2015. Prior to the completion of the entire study, the European Commission decided to publish some interim results on the inventory as well as analysis of existing and future needs and demand for cross-border eGovernment services. The documents available below include 1. a short introduction to the Study on the Analysis of the Needs for Cross-Border Services and Assessment of the Organisational, Legal, Technical and Semantic Barriers SMART 2011/0074; 2. an inventory of cross-border eGovernment services as well as an analysis of existing and future needs and demand for cross-border eGovernment services and 3. the related annexes.

Effective interaction between public administrations, citizens and businesses is essential to build the digital society. Online delivery of basic services to citizens and businesses (for instance personal documents, income taxes, company registration or VAT) help public authorities provide better services. Today, many public services are available online but this is not always the case across borders. Key in the strategy to improve such interaction is the development of Large Scale Pilot projects (LSPs) engaging stakeholders such as public authorities, service providers and research centres across the EU in the implementation of common solutions to deliver online public services and make them accessible throughout Europe. Five LSPs work on this: E-CODEX, EPSOS, STORK 2.0, PEPPOL and SPOCS... Discover them!

This catalogue provides an overview of the 102 projects that have resulted from the first four calls published by the the Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme (AALJP). This is an insight into the products, systems and services that are being developed by hundreds of small and medium enterprises, research, user organisations and others, throughout Europe. The AALJP is a funding activity that started in 2008, it aims to create better condition of life for the older adults and to strengthen the industrial opportunities in Europe through the use of information and communication technology (ICT). It carries out its mandate through the funding of across-national projects (at least three countries involved) that involves small and medium enterprises (SME), research bodies and user’s organizations (representing the older adults).

European researchers set out to develop a process for manufacturing high-quality disposable polymer-based surgical blades with funding of the Disblade project. Their ultimate goal was to enhance surface sharpness by 40 % compared to existing SS blades and to demonstrate stiffness, sharpness and wear resistance comparable to that of SS blades.

According to a study released in May by the European Commission's Joint Research Center, Denmark – along with England and Scotland – is seen as a pioneer in the use of telemedicine in standard patient treatments. The study further pointed out that the future success of telemedicine and telehealth programs depends on a number of factors, including funding for mainstreaming, an integrated governance model, stakeholder engagement and a strong set of legal and clinical standards. Denmark’s decision to base their telehealth system on Continua Guidelines underscores the importance of using industry standards from the start.

This report focuses on how to achieve a vision of affordable, less intrusive and more personalised care. Ultimately, increasing the quality of life as well as lowering mortality. Such a vision depends on the application of ICT and the use of data. The Task Force behind this report was convened to explore the potential of ICT in health innovation in the EU and make recommendations on what could be done now to ensure that Europe reaps the full benefits of eHealth in 2020.

Beyond their economic impact, digital technologies also play a vital role in improving people’s daily lives. They provide better access to information, enhance efficiencies and facilitate links between citizens, businesses and governments. Governments and businesses are looking for increasingly clever ways to encourage economic growth and save money for both themselves and citizens. The Large-Scale Pilots (LSPs) have been developed by the European Commission in close cooperation with EU Member States, industry, national administrations and local communities. This collaborative process ensures that all Europeans benefit from Europe’s commitment to developing ICT and the Digital Single Market. The second edition of the "Build Connect Grow" webzine, looking at the accomplishments of LSPs, is now available.

The VPH-Share project has now successfully completed its first year of actvities and have just published the first issue of its newsletter. VPH-Share is a 4-year large-scale integrating project funded under the European Community’s FP7 aiming at developing the infostructure and integrating the optimised services to: -expose and share data and knowledge, -jointly develop multiscale models for the composition of new VPH workflows, -facilitate collaborations within the VPH community.

The focus is on empowering patients to take more control of their own health through better access to information, including access to their own health records (starting with GP records); using technology to provide more convenient ways for people to access services - such as booking appointments with their GP online, ordering repeat prescriptions online etc; promoting transprency so that a wide range of quality information is available to enable people to make fully informed choices about the healthcare they receive; moving away from a "provide all" national IT programme to a "connect all" approach based on consistent national standards for information collection and systems to ensure they are interoperable; promoting the importance of informatics skills and capability for all staff groups in the service.

Discover the wide range of sessions and networking interactions you will benefit from after your registration to the event! To name a few: Exclusive access for ALL attendees to ALL registered delegates, including our speakers through our new online matchmaking service, PresdoMatch. 5 Keynote sessions including George Halvorson, CEO, Kaiser Permanente ‘Kaiser Permanente’s Healthcare IT Journey’, 6 High Level eHealth Conference sessions, 6 WoHIT sessions, 6 European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Aging sessions, A state of the Art exhibition floor with over 70 international exhibitors, etc. For full details, read the newsletter.

INTEGRATE promotes a novel IT-based approach aimed at enabling multidisciplinary collaboration in oncology research. This will be achieved through the creation of innovative biomedical infrastructures; emphasis on standards-based harmonization of efforts; the preservation, management and large-scale sharing of multi-level data; and the development of new methodologies and predictive multi-scale models in cancer. The INTEGRATE newsletters will describe aspects of the research problems in focus, inform readers about challenges encountered and progress made towards overcoming them, and refer to relevant project deliverables. We would like to engage our readers in discussions about data sharing and collaboration in the biomedical domain, as well as the scientific issues around information integration and interoperability.

The main focus during the third year of the EHR-QTN project was on the production of two important deliverables for this Thematic Network project: a Roadmap towards Sustainable Pan-European Certification of EHR Systems and the State of the Art of EHR Quality Labelling and Certification Procedures & Scenarios.

The healthcare staff of the municipality of Örebro (southern Sweden) rates highly the National Patient Summary (Nationell patientöversikt - NPÖ, in Swedish) service. Nine out of ten NPÖ users are 'satisfied' or 'very satisfied' with it, and more than 60 % of them believe that it has been highly or very highly beneficial for their work, according to a recent survey. The National Patient Summary enables qualified healthcare staff to access, with the patient's consent, online medical records filed by other caregivers and thereby obtain a comprehensive snapshot of the patient's health. This provides a better basis for diagnosis, treatment and monitoring while facilitating healthcare coordination between the healthcare professionals involved. The survey was conducted at the end of 2011 by a market research company for Inera AB - a software company jointly owned by the Swedish counties - which develops IT services on behalf of the Centre for eHealth in Sweden (CeHis) such as the NPÖ project.

In the past month several new publications by the project team have been accepted to journals and conferences, check the project's publications section for details.

This year the eHealth Week offers several optional sessions with a wide range of topics that impact many aspects of healthcare information technology. Read the newsletter to find out more!

This online journal gathers a wide variety of news published on twitter by different actors in the field. If you are interesting in receiving it, you are welcome to subscribe. As well if you are working in the field and have a twitter account, follow us @EU_ehealth and we will follow back so that your news will be featured in the Daily.

Welcome to The World of Health IT Exhibitor E-News, the monthly electronic publication that gives you the most up-to-date information and opportunities available exclusively for exhibitors.

In this second issue of the Newsletter epSOS presents the latest and most important achievements and activities of the epSOS project, as well as a forecast on upcoming actions. In the course of the year 2012, the epSOS pilot operation phase will be initiated and will last for one year. By implementing epSOS services, participating nations take an important step towards the goals of the EU directive on the application of patients’ rights in cross-border healthcare.

Learn how to safely and easily work, travel, face problems and get cured abroad in the EU thanks to the large scale pilots (epSOS, STORK, eCODEX, SPOCS and PEPPOL).