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Meeting healthcare challenges for an ageing and more mobile Europe
An ageing population and greater mobility are creating major challenges for European healthcare providers. As the European Commission seeks to foster a single electronic healthcare record that will enable EU citizens to receive a consistent 'continuum of care' wherever they may be, Oracle lends its support.
By 2050, 37% of the European population will be aged over 60. Falling birth rates and longer lifespans are contributing
to an ageing of the population that is already starting to have a significant impact on society.
But adapting to an ageing population is not easy – and particularly not for the healthcare sector, where its impact is perhaps felt more keenly than anywhere else. Older people require more healthcare than any other sector of the population, and with more old people living longer, the pressure on the sector is
set to increase exponentially over the coming years and decades.
At the same time, people of all ages across the European Union are coming to have higher expectations of the standard of healthcare they receive. Having become accustomed to the kind of ‘anytime, anywhere’ service increasingly provided in other sectors of the economy, patients not unreasonably expect to receive high-quality, efficient healthcare whenever and wherever they need it. Coupled with the increasing mobility of the European population not just within countries but also across borders, this expectation creates more challenges for healthcare
providers, administrations and payors.
This new Europe, with its ageing and highly mobile population, requires a new approach to healthcare. High quality care must be available wherever and whenever it is needed. This requires a standardized infrastructure to support consistent, high-quality and appropriate healthcare delivery not only across national borders, but also across other kinds of boundary – such as those that currently exist between healthcare institutions, primary care providers, pharmacies, payors,
governments and any other bodies involved in providing health care to European citizens.
In short, the new approach to healthcare must break down boundaries to provide a true ‘continuum of care’, with the individual patient at its core. Information concerning the patient must be available to essential actors in the healthcare sector, in order to provide appropriate and personalised care with due respect
for privacy and security requirements.
In order to create a patient-centric, cross-border IT framework, the data in these systems needs to be brought together in standard formats, to create a single, secure electronic patient record that can be accessed by all individuals and institutions that need it, including the patients themselves. This will allow the appropriate care to be delivered to the patient wherever he or she happens to be. It will also ensure that the care provider in each case has access to accurate and full historical information about the patient, reducing the risk of mistakes and misdiagnoses, and
allowing a fuller and better assessment to be made of the patient’s condition or symptoms.
The European Commission has already signalled its intention to move forward with interoperability and secure information exchange in the healthcare sector, with a proposed initiative for the development of a European Electronic Patient Summary. The proposed Summary will be a first step towards the secure and reliable
exchange of clinical health information between institutions, organisations and nations.
European Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou has also publicly stated that EU citizens should have the right to access health care in another country, if the required care is not available
in their own. He has launched a
public consultation on how this can be achieved, and his recommendations are due to be published later this
year.
Oracle wholeheartedly supports the move to create a streamlined, patient-centric infrastructure
for the delivery of healthcare across national and institutional boundaries In our response [
download PDF ] to Commissioner Kyprianou’s call for a public consultation, we set out what we believe to be the fundamental elements of an IT infrastructure that will support the delivery of true cross-border
healthcare delivery.
Numerous initiatives are already underway at member state and regional levels. The UK’s Connecting for Health, Germany’s Gesundheitskarte and France’s DMP project are all examples of national initiatives. In Italy, the region of Lombardy has created a region-wide system providing hospitals, primary care providers and pharmacies with access to electronic patient records, and similar projects are now underway in Sicily and Sardinia. As well as increasing the speed, quality and safety of patient care, both at the point of delivery and afterwards in terms of insurance claim processing, these single electronic health record systems are proven to reduce administrative time and cost for participating
institutions, increasing efficiency and lowering operating costs.
As the pressures of an ageing population combined with greater mobility across an enlarged European Union continue to put pressure on the EU’s healthcare sector, governments and healthcare institutions alike will look increasingly to ICT to help them rise to these new challenges. At Oracle we are pleased to have the opportunity to help address these challenges. We look forward to enhanced health care quality and access to patients
regardless of their location in Europe: a Europe of “patients without borders”.
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