Putting patients in the driving seat in future digital healthcare

The European Commission has unveiled an Action Plan to address barriers to the full use of digital solutions in Europe's healthcare systems. The goal is to improve healthcare for the benefit of patients, give patients more control of their care and bring down costs.

“While patients and health professionals are enthusiastically using telehealth solutions and millions of Europeans have downloaded smartphone apps to keep track of their health and wellbeing, digital healthcare has yet to reap its great potential to improve healthcare and generate efficiency savings” says the Action Plan.

The new Action Plan includes a number of specific action fields that are particularly relevant to European patients such as the focus on citizens’ digital health literacy, and the need to develop new indicators for assessing impact of eHealth services in cooperation with users. Moreover it is worthy highlighting the envisaged effort to promote more user-driven research and innovation in the areas of eHealth with strong user involvement especially in relation to investment under the Horizon 2020.
EPF has contributed to the reflection process on the new action plan through its involvement in the eHealth User Stakeholder Group in 2011 which starting from this year has become eHealth Stakeholder Group with the joint participation of eHealth user and industry representatives.

You can find the full list of actions in MEMO/12/959.

For more information, please contact liuska.sanna@eu-patient.eu