eHealth

Many EU citizens travel to or work in another Member State, however, their healthcare information is not always accessible in the Member States where they need the treatment. The increased mobility of citizens coupled with the advancements of digital technologies requires both health policies and health systems across the European Union to be more and more interconnected.

What is eHealth about?

eHealth refers to tools and services using information and communication technologies (ICTs) that can improve prevention, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring and management. So far the Digital Service Infrastructure for eHealth is planned to support several services:

Cross-border patient summary service

When a citizen makes an unplanned cross-border healthcare visit to a health provider in the EU, the health professional will have access to the person's Patient Summary (EU guidelines).

ePrescriptions and eDispensations

These services support the concept that a patient being abroad can receive the equivalent medication treatment that he would receive in his home country.

ePrescribing consist in an electronic prescription of medicine by a health professional and its electronic transmission to a pharmacy where the medicine can then be dispensed.
eDispensing, instead, is defined as the electronic retrieval of a prescription and the dispensing of the medicine to the patient as indicated in the corresponding ePrescription.

In the future, two other services, European Reference Networks and Interoperable Patient registries might be deployed. In particular, the European Reference Networks European reference networks (ERNs) will facilitate access to diagnosis, treatment and provision of affordable, high-quality and cost-effective healthcare.ERNs will also serve as focal points for medical training and research, information dissemination and healthcare evaluation.

The Digital Service Infrastructure for eHealth will be composed by core services at EU level which facilitate the generic services operated by the Member States to exchange of patient data and information on prescriptions with each other. It is foreseen that the Digital Service Infrastructure for eHealth will be fully operational by 2020.

What is the Policy Context?

These services pave the way towards delivering sustainable eHealth systems which would exchange cross-border data and provide services. This initiative is in line and supports the provisions of the cross-border Directive 2011/24/EU.

What's in it for me?

Are you a citizen or a patient?

You may use cross-border services, improved patients safety through continuity of care for example by immediate access to clinical information needed when abroad or enjoying the continuity of care across borders through ePrescriptions.

Are you a health professional?

You will work more efficiently as parts of the patients’ data would already be available.

Are you a researcher?

The digitalisation of health data will provide the possibility for a possibility for a quicker and accessible health data.

Are you a public administration or a private company?

The deployment of eHealth solutions will increase safety and quality of care throughout the EU, For example, ePrescriptions which will also support the documentation of dispensed drugs. In addition, this would facilitate the collecting and consolidating clinical data across borders to support public health policies and research.

Building block reuse

eHealth has committed to reuse the eDelivery and eID building blocks, and has committed to analyse the eSignature building block.

For more info, see also:

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