A major census of 900 European hospitals’ progress in healthcare IT is underway looking at a range of key factors in e-health development. The European Hospital Census is being carried out by HBS Consulting on behalf of the Health Information Network Europe (HINE) , a service run by Deloitte working with healthcare IT specialists, Silicon Bridge Research. Silicon Bridge director, Murray Bywater, said: “Nobody has ever looked at the market in a consistent way before.” Senior executives at a balanced sample of hospitals in 14 markets are being interviewed for the census by a multi-lingual team of 35 researchers based in Leipzig. Respondents have been recruited in German, France, Italy, UK/Ireland, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. Specific topics in the census centre on: the installed IT base at the hospitals, the hospitals’ investment plans, supplier selection and financial, integration and technology issues. The census should provide a detailed picture of the technology hospitals already have, what their current and future spending plans are and how they make decisions about healthcare technology. The census will cover acute general hospitals of all sizes from the public sector and for-profit and not-for-profit private sector. Bywater said that work done so far indicated a mixed picture with every country approaching the issues in a different way. The full census is due to be completed in August 2004. Four specific research studies fed by HINE census data are also due this year on: the implications of business process re-engineering in the healthcare context (April); the evolution of mobile computing (June); practical progress towards electronic prescribing (September) and the provision of clinical infrastructure support (November).
