Internet use in healthcare is expected to soar in Europe in the next four years, bringing electronic communication into the frontline of care delivery, according to analysts, Frost & Sullivan. A strategic analysis of the role of the net in healthcare delivery predicts an explosive rise in electronic booking in Europe from around five million appointments in 2004 to nearly 50 million in 2008. Steep rises in e-commerce drug buying, e-procurement by hospitals and e-mail usage by healthcare professionals are also said to be in the pipeline. The analysis, based on primary research and information from published sources, such as country industry forecasts, predicts that rising healthcare costs mean it is inevitable that governments and insurance companies will be driven to explore further cost saving ways of using the Internet. NHS Direct is cited as a leading edge development likely to be emulated by other EU countries. Frost & Sullivan healthcare research analyst Chris Cherrington commented: “Cost saving is emerging as the main driver since the Internet is a public data network that offers low cost data transfer. Increasing public use of the World Wide Web is forcing industry vendors to use websites to advertise and spread information about their products and services." “At the same time, e-mail has become ubiquitous and is now accepted as a mainstream method of business communication. Another reason for the rapid adoption of the Internet has been that healthcare giants and pharmaceuticals companies are using e-procurement to streamline operations." Problems likely to be encountered, according to the analysis, include: resistance from a hard core of medical sceptics; problems in maintaining patient data in a confidential format while granting access to authorised users and the inclusion of new eastern European EU members who are further behind in Internet use than their western partners. The sickness model of health also presents a challenge. “Governments, insurance companies and healthcare providers in Europe still consider illness with more importance than health. The total cost concept including preventative as well as curative healthcare has yet to become established, leading to high healthcare costs and poor use of available budgets,” the analysis says. The UK is portrayed as something of leader. The analysis predicts other European governments may follow its online healthcare facilities and that the UK is “expected to start a deliberate move to an e-health model”. Other punts on what may happen soon include an agreed standard for an electronic patient record; a move by some insurance companies to use the internet as their main channel for transactions and a surge ahead in Internet use by the Scandinavian countries. Conversely, the analysis predicts that EU states are unlikely in the near future to harmonise their healthcare systems across borders; governments won’t provide cheap Internet access for less-privileged citizens and that the continent’s ageing population will remain oriented towards traditional healthcare delivery channels. In the longer term, however, the analysis foresees the older generation becoming much more familiar with the Internet and predicts that online information will fuel interest in cross-border treatments – something the healthcare authorities may not be able to ignore. The great policy debates will not go away. The analysis says that healthcare provision and care of the elderly are likely to become the main subjects of political discourse in Europe as the ‘baby boomers’ head for retirement. Europe will have to choose, it says, between high-cost systems such as France’s and the highly-commercial, two tier system of the US.
