According to a recent report by OECD and European Commission, Estonia is on top of the list of 30 countries in implementing e-health services.
The study included 1737 hospitals from 27 European member states, Croatia, Norway and Iceland. According to the report, Estonia leads the way in Europe, followed by Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Great Britain. Estonia’s position is based on good infrastructure and the digital storing and exchange of data.
In addition, the report evaluated other ICT solutions as well as security and privacy in e-health. The report also included an evaluation study on the functionality and availability of ICT based services in hospitals where Estonia led the way. The four categories evaluated included hospital-side data input and viewing, decision support functions in the information system, data transmission between hospitals and telemedicine.
The head of Estonian E-Health Foundation, Mr Raul Mill believes cooperation between stakeholders has been the key to Estonia’s success. The next challenge for Estonia is to enhance the usability of existing systems to ensure quick data retrieval and convenience for health care professionals.
Research report “Benchmarking ICTs in health systems” was initiated by OECD in 2010 with the aim of improving data quality and accessibility concerning e-services in health care. The official report will be published in two weeks.
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Photos: EAS/Wikimedia Commons
How does this relate to outcomes? Last I checked, Estonia had the highest HIV rate in the EU. Has that improved through technology?