The eHealth Governance Initiative will focus on achieving an eHealth governance structure, in particular by developing strategies, priorities, recommendations and guidelines on how to develop eHealth in Europe in a coordinated way and joining efforts, involving stakeholders, especially patients and health professionals, in the hope of ensuring continuity of the healthcare provided either at home or crossing borders.
The eHealth Governance Initiative seeks a strong coordinated political leadership and the integration of eHealth into health policies. Furthermore, the eHGI will
support the political process and governance structures in setting the right priorities, developing strategies, recommendations and guidelines on how to promote an interoperable and sustainable eHealth implementation in Europe.
Expected Outcomes
- Improvements in eHealth governance and an enhanced co-ordination between MS and the EC eHealth policies, helping thus to improve health outcomes and ensuring continuity of care within and across MS
- Promoting political discussion on the agenda
- Close collaboration with existing eHealth-related projects (epSOS, Digital Agenda, Stork, HPRO, etc.), leading thus to a more coordinated European approach, and ultimately to an efficient use of resources
- Building an eHealth European Governance framework, including establishment of high level policies and auditable processes, leading to a policy development and strategy alignment in eHealth activities
- Addressing the needs of users in the developments of national strategies or EU initiatives
- Enhancing trust and acceptability with various stakeholder groups (health care professionals, citizens, etc.), and building a proportionate level of trust in both systems and human processes within cross-border health data exchange
- Enabling and facilitating the development, integration and European wide deployment of knowledge-driven, semantic and technical interoperable eHealth services and infrastructures
- Translating respective deliverables into clear policy proposals for decision and action at the political level
- Streamlining the process to be in line with the political ambitions of the MS and the EC
- Addressing national and European law and regulations, removing barriers in a European information health space
- Producing deliverables - press releases, newsletters, flyers, brochures, journal articles to increase awareness about the project. Also fact sheets, brochures, conference presentations and conference posters will be prepared and produced to promote the project and its outcomes.
- Preparing annual communication plans explaining the communication and cooperation mechanism with stakeholders in order to share outcomes.
Overall expected results
The project is expected to create a European coordination platform, contributing to a single European eHealth area through streamlined policy, uptake, trust, and awareness in using ICT in health care sector.
Interoperability roadmap, constituting a concrete strategy in building eHealth network within MS and in Europe, will represent one of the main health policy instruments establishing the factual basis for decision making in the eHealth domain.
The project will speed up the adoption process of encryption and electronic signature mechanism through building security and data protection framework, addressing thus identification, authentication and role-based authorization needs inevitable for an enhanced security in health care sector between health care professionals and patients.
The eHGI will make valuable contributions to the EU-wide implementation of EU objectives set in the Digital Agenda, Directive on the application of patients' rights in cross-border healthcare and within the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing.