“National authorities should make telemedicine part of a clear business plan”

The eHealth 2008 conference “eHealth without frontiers” highlights national and pan-European initiatives to spread eHealth applications across the EU, including telemedicine services. HealthTech Wire talked to Stephan Schug, manager of the European Health Telematics Association (EHTEL) about setting up an infrastructure for telemedicine applications.

Published: 05/07

- (HealthTech Wire) - Which are the applications EU citizens can experience in their daily lives – today or in the very near future? Which are the applications that will have the greatest impact in the long-term?

As the number of the European ageing population with a number of chronic conditions is soon expected to outweigh the capacity of hospitals and traditional nursing staff, telemedicine is expected to become a major contributor to supporting both health and social care as well as the quality of life of elderly people living at home. Concretely, today’s telemedicine applications include teleconsultation, telemonitoring and counselling involving medical specialists. Examples include telemonitoring of diabetes patients or cardiac patients, international experts providing teleconsultation to dermatologists, blood pressure measurement from a distance, online consultations with general practitioners and cardiologists, transmission of critical bio signals of the patient from emergency site to the hospital, video-conferencing between medical staff, or teleeducation for Continuous Medical Education. Those applications dealing with chronic disease management and more importantly those dealing with health management are most likely to have the most significant long-term impact.

Telemedicine depends on highly advanced networks and communications infrastructure. Are you expecting different adoption levels across the European Union?

All EU Member states are in the process of setting up the appropriate eHealth infrastructure but not all Member States are deploying it at the same pace. In some cases, this is down to a basic lack of sufficient broadband cable infrastructure for a national network. In other cases, the slow pace can be more attributed to long testing phases of both EU and nationally funded telemedicine pilot projects. Other reasons provided included reticence to adopt due to poorly documented and unproven return on investment models, the unclear and restrictive legal environment and the lack of reimbursement schemes for telemedicine by both statutory and private health insurance schemes.

What are your recommendations for setting up a suitable infrastructure?

EHTEL’s recommendations are very clear in advocating for national competent authorities to ensure that telemedicine is part of a clear business plan that requires demonstrating tangible health gains as well as financial outputs as part of the key performance indicators.

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