On the 29th of June, COCIR association was invited by the European Patients Forum to present some of he key aspects of the structural funds use in eHealth in a Conference called EU Health Open Forum 2010 . As a representative, my industry fellows from COCIR named me… But, what is the context of this Open Forum? The EU Health Strategy aims to deliver concrete results in improving health. As set out in the Lisbon Treaty, the EU has a unique role to improve and protect health and in addition to facilitate cooperation on health. Given Member States' responsibilities in health at national, regional and local levels, and the need to respect subsidiarity, all stakeholders must be closely involved in the implementation of the strategy. To that end, Health in all policies is also about involving new partners in health policy. The European Commission will develop partnerships to promote the goals of the strategy, including with NGOs, industry, academia and the media.
In addition, the on-going process within the EU 2020 strategy demonstrates the importance of health in all policies: EU citizens must be key partners in constructing the strategy and are able to play a key role in delivering the objectives which were laid down.

Under the overall theme of "Together for Health – a Strategy for the EU 2020" the conference was set to mark an important step towards strengthening the involvement of all stakeholders in contributing to the development and implementation of actions and activities to protect and improve the health of European citizens. Building on the progress made through structures as the EU Health Forum, the European Commission will work closely with stakeholder groups, and with regional and local level bodies with a view to optimising their contribution to the implementation of the EU health strategy.

So, I was delighted to stress again the main advantages and the main difficulties that the industry is facing in applying for tenders based on structural funds. Many of them are related to the lack of support for local and national authorities to prepare tenders, other are related to the lack of transparency and local bias towards preferred providers and other related to the inherent complexity of the eHealth implementations. These implementations are not implying only technology but also training human resources, managing change management and developing visionary business models.

The main problems that the industry is facing are:

As a synthetic view, the COCIR  recommendations are:

1. Integrated approach needed from EC (coordination and coherence between DG SANCO, DG Digital Agenda, DG REGIO and MSs);

2. Continue to invest in health projects, recognizing increasing demand of chronic disease and ageing;

3. Pay particular attention to training and education of health providers/users and change management programs;

4. Increase transparency of public tender (translate national tenders and submit them to public consultation on EU portal);

5 .Facilitate access to public tenders (foresee budget for building tenders and reduce the part of co-financing for the Member States);

6. Control the time to pre-financing (limiting the time to 45 days);

7. Provide functional specifications in Health tenders and quality criteria by type of tender (e.g. infrastructure, EHR, ePrescribing);

8. Avoid national/regional detailed technical tenders that risk to be obsolete due to the pace of innovation in technology and could favour specific providers;

9. Increase EU scrutiny of major implementations;

10. Simplify the application process for eligible beneficiaries.

We look forward working with the EC on the applications of these recommendations in order to speed up the implementation of successful and proven eHealth applications in countries supported by structural funds.

Dr Octavian Purcarea

Director – Industry Market Development Europe

World Wide Health Team

Microsoft