Brussels, 25/03/2014 (Agence Europe) - eHealth is developing and is starting to take off in Europe, according to studies carried out in hospitals and with general medical practitioners published by the European Commission on 24 March. The countries of the North, and particularly the Scandinavian countries, come out top. According to the studies, 60% of GPs used online health tools in 2013, or a 50% increase compared to 2007. The Commission wishes to go much further, flagging up the ageing population in Europe and the advantages of e-health in reducing expenditure. “By making the most use of digital technology, we can reduce costs, put patient back in control, make healthcare more efficient and help European citizens to take an active part in society (…). It is time to take it up a gear”, said Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who is responsible for the digital strategy. Commissioner for Health Tonio Borg said that eHealth solutions “can generate better care for patients and greater efficiency for health systems”.
The main findings of these surveys are as follows:
1) the countries which are the most active in practising eHealth within the hospital system are Denmark (66%), Estonia (63%), Sweden and Finland (62% each); 2) eHealth services are mainly used for traditional recording and reporting activities rather than for clinical purposes: just 10% of GPs hold online consultations; 3) when it comes to digitising patient health records, the Netherlands takes the gold with 83.2% digitisation, followed by Denmark (80.6%) and the United Kingdom (80.5%); 4) just 9% of hospitals allow patients to access their own medical records online and this access is in many cases only partial; 5) when adopting eHealth, hospitals and GPs experienced many barriers (lack of interoperability, lack of regulatory framework and inadequate resources); 6) as regards information exchange, 48% of hospitals share medical information electronically with external GPs and 70% with external health care providers ; the member states which are the most active in this area are Denmark, Estonia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden (virtually 100%); 7) GPs make only limited use of electronic prescriptions and doctor-patient e-mail interaction (32% and 35% respectively) ; the most active are Estonia (100%), Croatia (99%) and Sweden (97%) in the former case, and Denmark (100%), Estonia (70%) and Italy (62%) in the latter; 8) fewer than 8% of hospitals share medical information electronically with healthcare providers located in other EU countries; 9) just 9% of hospitals offer patients the opportunity to be remotely monitored.
When asked why they were not using eHealth services more, doctors' reasons included a lack of remuneration (79%), insufficient knowledge of IT skills (72%), the lack of interoperability of systems (73%) and the lack of a regulatory framework on confidentiality and privacy for e-mail doctor-patient communication (71%). (IL)