Efforts to increase the levels of ICT in healthcare will not succeed if average citizens are not involved in discourse about e-health policy, a key group of European informatics professionals is cautioning.
The European Health Telematics Associatiuon (EHTEL) issued a paper and companion documents on patient safety and electronic health records at the first-ever World of Health IT conference in Geneva last week. “Currently, most discussion about the development of e-health systems happens between the developers and national institutions where there is very little interaction between those organisations and the patient,” states the preface.
Additionally, EHTEL say that if “consensus” organisations drawn up to advise health ministries on issues of personal health and national healthcare priorities do not look beyond patients with chronic illnesses and fail to encompass healthy citizenry, e-health policy will fall short. “To represent the field, you have to be [inclusive of] more than a chronic patient,” explains EHTEL Director Angelica Frithiof.
EHTEL also advocates greater adoption of electronic prescribing. “There is very, very clear evidence that this is already saving costs,” says Dr Stephan Schug, EHTEL co-founder and manager of the EC-funded Interoperability Initiative for a European eHealth area (i2-Health).
The documents are meant to be “live,” Frithiof says, open to debate and modification as e-health policies evolve.
Schug says that EHTEL eventually would like to see the establishment of an independent, pan-European corporation to sort through international differences in reimbursement and pricing mechanisms, semantic standards, branding and composition of medicines, and, of course, language.
At least one public official is pleased with the focus on home care. In a keynote address to the gathering of about 1,700 health ICT professionals, European Parliament member Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne, representing south-east England, called personalised health monitoring and care a “development of great potential.”
The baroness further said that ICT has the potential to become the third largest industry in European healthcare, reaching 5 per cent of total health expenditures by 2010. According to a video address by Viviane Reding, the EC’s commissioner for information society and media, ICT now accounts for about 2 per cent of Europe’s healthcare budget.
“Improving ICT infrastructure must become a top priority, and policies must reflect this,” Baroness Nicholson said, adding that policy-makers ought to link the health, and general ICT and telecommunications sectors within their own countries. “We need to build and sustain a global ICT policy in health.”
Other organisations used the World of Health IT stage to publicise their own initiatives toward similar goals.
Representatives of the World Health Organisation, headquartered just minutes away from the Geneva Palexpo convention centre, talked of the newly released country-by-country profiles of e-health capabilities, the second part of the WHO’s “Connecting for Health: Global Vision, Local Insight” report, a product of last year’s World Summit on the Information Society.
While there are no surprises in the profiles of developed nations, WHO project manager Joan Dzenowagis explains that the data may help shape attitudes and priorities in poorer countries. For example, Dzenowagis reports that, given the choice between ICT and simple access to care, sentiments in India might skew toward the latter.
Meanwhile, the US-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) has created a new branch for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. HIMSS EMEA, to be managed out of Brussels, is starting with the approximately 600 to 800 European members of the main HIMSS group to build an organisation with a separate governing council.
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