The Impact of eHealth on the Quality & Safety of Healthcare
A Systemic Overview & Synthesis of the LiteratureReport for the NHS Connecting for Health Evaluation Programme
Josip Car, Ashly Black, Chantelle Anandan, Kathrin Cresswell, Claudia Pagliari, Brian McKinstry, Rob Procter, Azeem Majeed and Aziz Sheikh
- There have been substantial developments in information technology hardware and software capabilities over recent decades and there is now considerable potential to apply these technological developments in relation to aspects of healthcare provision.
With this Briefing Paper, EHTEL would like to offer all stakeholders, i.e. politicians, citizens/patients, health professionals, healthcare providers, health insurers and many others a snapshot of the State of the Art on the European, National and Regional levels with the focus on sustainable services. Based on a summary of what has been achieved - particularly in the form of routinely used (but often still small scale) telemedicine services across Europe - a set of recommendations towards a "Vision for Europe 2020: Integrated Telemedicine Services" is established. 
This report presents the outcomes of the "Pilot on eHealth Indicators" study, carried out by empirica in association with IPSOS on behalf of the European Commission, Information Society and Media Directorate-General. The data used for this report were collected by means of a survey of primary care physicians and their use of ICT for eHealth purposes. The survey was carried out in all 27 Member States of the European Union and in Norway and Iceland in 2007. 
Brussels, 17.04.2008
The term eHealth, although now quite current in Europe and, indeed, throughout the world, still is rather new, making its first appearances in the scientific and policy literature around 1999. Its predecessors, however, date back to the 1960s when the concepts of health informatics and bio-medical computing began to occupy the minds of academic physicists, mathematicians, and medics.