Yesterday I have been invited to speak about new business models of eHealth at a conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Very surprising is that the Conference (entitled The New Age of Health IT) was organized by the International Bar Association and centred on eHealth.

Many presentations were around the legal environment of eHealth, governmental policies and some law cases around confidentiality and privacy. It appears that in some countries, such as South Africa, the legal environment in Public Administration is so restrictive that it impeaches the collection of vital statistical data. However, the private sector is a heaven for clinical studies being less surveyed.

In my presentation,  I identified the main barriers to the eHealth adoption namely – trust, usability,  lack of business model, empowerment  of patients and users.

I also reminded to the audience my previous work in the European Commission and the efforts that the eHealth team did to make available legal details concerning eHealth in each EU country. The legal environment in EU is developed in a series of reports recently published by EC.  See here.

I also outlined that numerous changes in computing power, emergence of cloud computing, new interfaces such as Natural User Interface, will change the way that health practitioners will perceive technology.

Moreover, I outlined the need for Electronic Health Record with Decision Support System and workflow management as a minimum condition to achieve real saving and increase of quality of healthcare.

I also met the Chairman of the association Patient Privacy Rights (www.patientprivacyrights.org) – Dr Deborah Peel) who acknowledged the important efforts that Microsoft did to largely consult patients and individuals about the privacy concerns, before launching the Personal Health Record platform HealthVault. In her opinion, these efforts are unique and should be largely taken as an example for building eHealth applications. 

On my way home, I was thinking that finally the main barrier to eHealth implementation in Europe is not the privacy and confidentiality aspects of health data but the procurement procedures. In many countries, there is a lack of real business model around implementation of eHealth technology and the procurement procedures is following some perceived urgent needs without building a comprehensive architecture. Of course, there are some exceptions in EU – Denmark being and example of well thought implementation.

I hope that this kind of multidisciplinary congresses – were people of different horizons are meeting – will provide more guidance to the governments in their strategy for sustainability of healthcare.

Dr Octavian Purcarea

Director – Industry Market Development

Worldwide Health

Microsoft