"Definitely at the beginning, eHealth was not driven by the idea of improving health care or patient-doctor relationship but by the idea of rationalising it to make it more efficient and productive, as well as by illusions of health care becoming less expensive," said Dr. Daniel Mart from Standing Committee of European Doctors (CPME).
"We have the impression that industry has too much influence here and has its own agenda," he said, adding that it is only now that people are demanding proof as to whether eHealth is actually improving the quality of care and reducing the incidence of illnesses and whether people are living longer or better as a result. "The issue is that we first implement something and only then we look whether it is really beneficiary," said Dr. Mart.
According to Dr. Mart, doctors also feel that they have so far been excluded from the eHealth development process and demand that the voice of the profession be heard. "It would be great for once to have a brainstorming in hospitals to get them involved. We don't want to be sold a technology that is working in another framework and not implementing our needs."
He noted that medicine is not comparable to a lot of other e-applications or technologies, emphasising that it is a very sensitive issue with specific needs regarding protection of data and privacy and confidentiality of data transmission. "Our needs in this are much higher than in the financial sector for example. Access control should be the highest priority and the control of the data should be in the hands of the patient," he added.
"We don't want to end up in a situation where, mainly, only the technology gets financed but not the reliability, security, availability and protection of the data," said Dr. Mart.
Furthermore, the doctors underline the need to preserve the doctor-patient relationship and the need for "a strategy and some planning". Strategic planning on organisational structure in health care should, according to Dr. Mart, be discussed with the profession - first of all to outline the benefits. Moreover, the benefits have to be analysed, evaluated and fed back into the system "to see from very early on whether it is worthwhile working towards that direction or not", he said.
"We don't have enough evaluation and feedback to see that all this is benefiting something other than the European ICT industry and that is not enough of an argument for us to go into this."
To read the interview with Dr. Mart in full, please click here.
