With this Briefing Paper, EHTEL aims to contribute to the re-balancing of deployment efforts between infrastructure and clinical services and between ICT experts and health professionals. It furthermore analyse what should be done to make additional telemedicine services sustainable to support the health and social needs of European citizens/patients.
This report will be released to the public next week at the occasion of
- "TeleHealth 2008: International Conference and Exhibition for ICT Solutions in the Health Sector" organized in the context of the CeBIT
7-8 March 2008, Hannover, Germany - "4th Annual World Health Care Congress - Europe 2008"
10-12 March 2008, Berin, Germany
Telemedicine services respond to today's health and social demands, i.e. treatment of chronic patients, support for the quality of life of elderly people living at home and they also support the patient empowerment of well-informed citizens to make healthcare choices.
With the evolving availability of eHealth infrastructures we are likely to observe good opportunities for a "renaissance of telemedicine" with a new generation of highly interconnected services integrated into clinical use cases as e.g. the case management of chronic heart failure. These services will be geared at being for wide and routine use, but also will be part of the business process and thus sustainable.
With this Briefing Briefing, 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.
Starting from a minimum of definition work (telemedicine is basically "care at a distance"), the Briefing Paper highlights the success factors of sustainable services as opposed to discontinued or only minimally maintained services from pilot projects. Here the current challenge is to aggregate the achieved pieces of evidence, to consolidate the results, to integrate approaches on the basis of international, open standards, and to drive them towards operational development. Furthermore, a distinct shift is needed from telemedicine applications as stand-alone, added-value component driven by the paradigm of technology-push, toward eHealth services emerging as one-of-many features in digital medical work environments driven by the paradigm of demand-pull.
By adopting the terminology of Internet services, the Briefing Paper differentiates between distributed, networked use of specific specialised medical expertise, i.e. teleservices between health professionals/doctors ("D2D") like teleconsultation, teleradiology and telepathology from telemedicine services directly offered to patients ("D2P") such as telemonitoring and telehomecare, emergency care, care of mobile patients and Internet based patient consultations.
The state-of-the-art of telemedicine and telehealth in Europe is completed by Best Practice examples and National case reports thereby providing a sound basis for a long term vision for integrated telemedicine services.
On the basis of the observations the Briefing Papers delivers some key messages:
- Facilitating change for professionals and patients;
- Involving professionals and patients in eHealth through telemedicine;
- Establishing a culture of interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration;
- Making National strategies for sustainable telemedicine explicit;
- Establish a European support framework for sustainable telemedicine.
These recommendations are of course open for comments by the Members of EHTEL and our different stakeholder groups. They will serve as foundations for EHTEL creating a cross-stakeholder telemedicine expert group and developing new initiatives for the two coming years with a view to support all stakeholders in the deployment of eHealth and telemedicine services in support of the transformation of health care delivery.
For further information, please visit:
http://www.ehtel.org
About EHTEL
EHTEL is networking all stakeholders concerned by the implementation eHealth services with a view to enable them voicing their views and to share experience with colleagues and representatives of all other stakeholders coming from Europe and beyond.
EHTEL is an international association whose corporate members belongs to all eHealth Stakeholder groups, being Ministries of Health of several States and Regions, Competence Centres, Health Professional organisations, associations representing Patients, Health Insurers, Research Institutes, IT and pharmaceutical industrials...
For further information, please visit http://www.ehtel.org.