eHealth: Driving Healthcare into the 21st Century

Challenge in Europe
Across Europe most healthcare providers are facing common problems:
- A growing aging population, making increasing demands on health systems
- A more demanding population
- A need to control increase costs of delivering health services
- Increased focus on patient safety
- Cross-border mobility of patients

eHealth is seen as the way forward for healthcare systems. Currently the healthcare sector lag behind other sectors in the use of ICT so there is the potential for rapid growth as they start to adopt this technology.

What is eHealth?
eHealth is defined as encompassing information and communication technology (ICT) - enabled solutions providing benefits to health, be it at the individual or social level and is expected to contribute significantly to the father development of health systems. Read more about eHealth...

Currently the eHealth market is about 2% of the total healthcare spend in Europe, this is expected to double in volume (about half the size of the pharmaceutical market). The HINE Report from Deloitte & Touche values the EU eHealth market at €20billion.

Typical eHealth applications include:
- ePrescriptions: electronic transfer of prescriptions between doctors and pharmacy
- Electronic Health Record (EHR): storage of patient details, results etc electronically. This is a move away from traditional paper based notes systems
- Networks and infrastructures to allow data transfer within hospital but also hospital to hospital and within the health and social systems.

The diagram below shows the adoption of HER and eHealth in 2004 across Europe.

World of Health IT – Vienna, Oct 2007
At the recent WHIT event in Vienna the core theme was the development of eHealth within the EU and the need for interoperability between countries. This is particularly important going forward for the EU as its borders are opened up allowing easier movement from country to country by people. This is a massive challenge as individual countries are deploying eHealth strategies unique to their local demands and yet there is a need (for example) for a hospital in Germany to read and transfer data from a HER generated in Hungary.

The EU commission is currently working on a number of projects to try to address formulated from the eHealth Action Plan: COM (2004) 356 Final. The main areas of activity are:
- National / regional roadmaps
- Common approach for patient identifier
- Interoperability standards for HER and messaging
- Boosting investments in eHealth
- Certification
- Legal Frameworks


EU standards for eHealth
There is currently a Mandate m/403 in place focusing on eHealth and the EHR in Europe. It covers patient and healthcare practioners identifiers; patient summary records and emergency data set.

It is a 2 phase process to convert the mandate to a standard. Currently in Phase 1 it will be 3-4 years before the standard is fully available.

What does this mean for Zebra?
The investment in healthcare in eHealth is opening up many new application opportunities for Zebra. By moving from paper based records to electronic records there is the demand to be able to see these records at the bedside. This means that hospitals are investing in mobile computers in the form of tablet pcs, handheld computers and computers on Wheels (COWs) – computers on a trolley with a battery power source.

The potential in this area has been signalled by the investment and development by Intel in their Mobile Clinical Assistant (MCA) concept. The MCA is being manufactured by 2 companies: Motion Computing and Philips. Motion Computing have called their product the C5. Philips announced their Cliniscape product at the World of Health IT event in Vienna. Full launch to the market is Feb 08.

This ability to access records at the bedside is also enabling other applications such as test request and medication prescribing - all of which create a demand for labels to be printed at the bedside. On the back of this we are seeing growing interest in the QL220 / 320 mobile printers to product labels at the patient’s bedside.

This "mobile" healthcare development is very complimentary to the current patient safety initiatives we are seeing around patient id (wristbands) and blood supply chain.