The European Cloud in Health Advisory Council (ECHAC), a group of healthcare organisations, technology companies and patient representatives that collaborate on pan-European initiatives in healthcare, has published a white paper defining and proposing a development plan for the use of data to improve health outcomes and delivery of care.
The white paper lays out technological innovations and advances that can drive innovation in European healthcare and bring the standards of care to a new level. These include telemedicine, artificial intelligence for treatment delivery and cloud computing for managing health data.
The paper also addresses potential regulatory barriers, which include not only EU health policy regulations, but also a lack of coordination between national health authorities. A particular challenge is the concern about protection of patient data. National laws on privacy protection differ from each other considerably. The paper recommends member states consider implementing the new EU General Data Protection Regulation to standardise patient data protection laws at the pan-European level and provide a positive environment for the implementation of eHealth across Europe.
Link to the ECHAC whitepaper:
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