E-health is one of those holy grails in healthcare policy. The technology is talked about in the most glowing terms as promising a new era of efficiency, consumer-friendliness and dynamism but, in reality, such promises are rarely delivered. While private companies or individual parts of Europe’s healthcare systems may have introduced one-off, bespoke solutions, we are a long way away from seeing an integrated e-health market in Europe or indeed in the fragmented United States insurance system.
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In the West, due to ageing populations, e-health has always been a centre of focus.

While there are indeed many hurdles to overcome, I believe that there are many opportunities just around the corner.
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I think that the greatest opportunity for standards will not be the existing systems but in systems new changes to the system. Essentially, the Point of Care has changed and moves from the hospital to your home and to your body……

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Talk of eHealth is of a new era of efficiency, consumer-friendliness and dynamism, but we are a long way away from seeing an integrated eHealth market in Europe or the US…..

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Welcome to the second week in standards.

This week we have a range of announcements from Telecoms, Cloud, Privacy and other domains

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Tomorrow (May 25th) the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) kicks off in Amsterdam. This is the 17th edition of the biannual event which began in 1978 and will feature around 280 keynote speakers from business, government and academia.

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On Thursday February 25, Talkstandards hosted a lively open forum on ICT Standardization and eHealth.

Ajit Jaokar spoke of the possibility that eHealth will take off in emerging markets and what the implications thereof could be. As an illustration, Jaokar mentioned the M-Pesa mobile payment service which took off in Kenya, serving 6.5 million subscribers by May 2009
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In the e-health sector, ICT standards are obviously important since ICT solutions for healthcare are heavily data and information driven and having seamless access to such information is a foundational matter.
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One of the barriers to the adoption of eHealth is the adoption of standards. And there are in turn unending barriers to the adoption of standards: legal, cultural, administrative, financial, organizational, and of course technical constraints not to omit the lack of incentives. Hence an interesting Norwegian paper by Riita Hellmann which speaks of “ubiquitous heterogeneity.”
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Five years ago the eHealth solutions shown on this map of the world: http://tinyurl.com/wwxds did not exist, but they now provide better quality and more productive healthcare for millions of patients. The happy accident that led to the Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) and XDS for Imaging (XDS-I) profiles in Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise would not have occurred without the supporting International communication standards and the dedicated experts and companies that supported their development. Many regional and Federal initiatives in the US successfully adopted the previously mentioned profiles and their underlying standards.
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