A survey carried out in about 1,800 hospitals in the 28 EU countries plus Iceland and Norway measures the level of deployment and take-up of ICT and eHealth applications in acute care hospitals in Europe.
internal reference: SMART 2011/0020; SMART 2012/0036 (survey)
The survey, carried out by PwC EU Services in cooperation with Global Data Collection Company, covered
i) ICT Infrastructure,
ii) ICT Applications,
iii) Health Information Exchange and
iv) Security and Privacy.
Based on the survey results, the Joint Research Centre IPTS developed two composite indicators on eHealth deployment and eHealth availability & use and made a comparison with a previous survey carried out in 2010. The results suggest that the deployment of eHealth in European acute care hospitals has increased over the period 2010-2013 (from an average of 0.39 to 0.42 in a range of 0 to 1). Moreover, the gap between best performers (mostly Nordic countries) and less advanced countries (mostly Eastern European and Greece) in hospital eHealth deployment has narrowed. Advanced eHealth functionalities are not widely used across hospitals, however, when available, they are quite popular. For example, digital archiving of radiology images is available in just 53% of EU hospitals, but in almost all of these (92%) it is fully used.
The results also suggest that connectivity is still lagging behind, as most of the hospitals do not share electronically medical information that they produce/store in this format. Finally, the vast majority of hospitals do not allow patients to access their complete health records online thus preventing more involvement in their healthcare.
Top performing countries for eHealth deployment among hospitals are Denmark (66%), Estonia (63%), Sweden and Finland (both 62%). Full country profiles are available (see below).
The study "European Hospital Survey- Benchmarking Deployment of eHealth services (2012-2013)" is composed of the following reports:
Source
Digital Agenda for Europe
