Session 5: International Project Space

Physicians, nurses and other professionals interact with patients every day, and ICT, especially the internet, can enhance the communication processes among them, providing timely information to patients about disease prevention, health promotion, as well as treatment of diseases. ICT skills are: access to health science information, management of health information and knowledge, generation and dissemination of health knowledge. The development of these new ICT skills requires digital literate people. Funded by the CAMEI EC funded project, a whitepaper has been produced, identifying some key recommendations about how USA organisations and communities can cooperate with EU organisations in order to empower sharing, reuse, repurposing and creation of educational material applied in different context and promote renewal of programmes. After the analysis of opportunities about education of IT skills for the healthcare workforce in EU-US: authors conclude that: • Common challenges and opportunities on providing IT skills for healthcare workforce have been identified, assessing the cooperation potential among the EU and the US. • A benchmark in detail policy priorities of US on IT skills for Healthcare workforce and research sub-areas with those of EU (i2010, FP7-ICT strategic priorities, Horizon 2020) has been performed to help partners from the other side to be involved in joint related activities. • Open Education and the creation of some educational frameworks have been identified as the means and the guidelines of sharing, re-using, and repurposing technologies of new educational material and programs for IT-skilled workforce in healthcare applied in the different context, different languages and cultures in the EU and US. • A prominent base of cooperation where mutual benefits can be generated for both regions has been located, identifying key players from the EU and US.

The purpose of this work is to present the actions concerning alignment of eHealth policy issues between Member States in EU in the framework of the third EU Health Programme 2014-2020 and the Greek role. On the EU level the eHealth Network (eHN) is the central political platform to coordinate and prepare the respective actions. Those actions are technically designing and supporting by the body of the Member States who participating in the 6th Joint Action: Support of eHealth Network (eHN JA). The eHN JA body has the intention to act as the main preparatory body for the eHealth Network (eHN). eHealth policy is rolling out large-scale eHealth investments to cross-border eHealth services. Having the experience of programs concerning eHealth services, now the interest shifts to eHealth services to support cross-border exchange of health data. Citizens in EU are crossing borders more often as labor migrants, tourists or as patients to have special care, the transferability of health data across borders is important to guarantee coordination and continuity of health services provided by different health care providers in different countries. Aspects of organizational, technical, semantic and legal interoperability of ICT in health are a prerequisite that this cross border transactions of health data can actually be implemented. Following the adoption of “Guidelines on a Minimum Patient Summary Dataset for Electronic Exchange” the next step is the eHealth policy in EU level is the adoption of “Guidelines supporting Member States in developing the interoperability of ePrescription” and to put in place Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) funding for shared eHealth services. This work presents the main tasks and actions designing by the JA in the context mentioned above and the role of Greek participation in the Joint Action.