The eHealth Action Plan was adopted by the European Commission on 7 December 2012. It updates the first action plan issued in 2004 and proposes a set of 16 actions to boost the deployment of eHealth with a focus on four areas:
- Achieve wider interoperability in eHealth services
- Support research and innovation and competitiveness in eHealth
- Facilitate deployment and adoption of eHealth (through CEF, cohesion policy, digital literacy, measuring eHealth added value)
- Promote international cooperation on eHealth at global level
The eHealth Network should help in the implementation of the Action Plan, thereby establishing a link with the national level.
16 ‘ACTIONS’:
- Support the eHealth Network in producing guidelines on a dataset for patient summary records to be exchanged across borders, common measures for interoperable electronic identification and authentication in eHealth and will enhance security of healthinformation and eHealth services and interoperability of databases for medicinal products.
- Encourage Member States’ involvement in the EIP AHAIP to help them develop and share their national (including regional) eHealth strategies, taking into account international recommendations, and deploying promising solutions for active and healthy ageing on a larger scale.
- Launch a study to examine Member States’ laws on EHR for recommendations on legal aspects of interoperability
- Organise governance for CEF, including large scale deployment of interoperable eHealth services
- Support concrete steps towards greater integration of processes for cross-border eHealth. The Commission will make proposals on organisational issues with the aim of facilitating cooperation in the EU
- CIP and Horizon 2020 to support digital health literacy and the development of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for telemedicine services with particular emphasis on nursing and social care workers
- Enhance work on data collection and benchmarking activities in health care with relevant national and international bodies to include more specific eHealth indicators and assess the impact and economic value of eHealth implementation
- Promote policy discussions on eHealth at global level to foster interoperability, the use of international standards, develop ICT skills, compare evidence of the effectiveness of eHealth, and promote ecosystems of innovation in eHealth
- Assess cost benefits, productivity gains and business models, notably through Health Technology Asessment (HTA)
- Support actions to improve the market conditions for entrepreneurs developing products and services in the fields of eHealth and ICT for wellbeing
- Leverage the CEF and the ERDF for the large scale deployment of innovative tools, the replicability of good practices and services for health, ageing and wellbeing, with a particular attention to improving equal access to services
- Adoption of a Green Paper on mHealth and health and wellbeing applications (by 2014)
- Sets of common indicators will be made available to measure the added value and benefit of eHealth solutions, based on work funded by the Commission in partnership with stakeholders
- Leverage Horizon 2020 to support research and innovation in personalised medicine, advanced analytics, new digital media, eHealth interoperability, etc
- Leverage Horizon 2020 to support research and innovation in semantic interoperability, interoperability testing, labelling and certification, maintaining assets from previous EU funded projects, etc
- Propose an eHealth interoperability framework