The European Commission has published a draft transatlantic eHealth/health IT Cooperation Roadmap to facilitate cooperation between the US and the EU in these fields.
The ‘vision’ of the roadmap will be to support the “suppliers of eHealth solutions, working toward the shared objective of developing, deploying, and using eHealth science and technology to empower individuals, support care, improve clinical outcomes, enhance patient safety and improve the health of populations”
The US and the EU, through the Transatlantic Economic Council will focus on priority areas to realise this:
Advancing eHealth/health IT Interoperability
eHealth/health IT workforce development
This roadmap will be designed to be a living document that is adaptable to reflect emerging markets.
Public, academic and private-sector stakeholders from the EU and US are invited to collaborate through virtual meetings and online tools which will be set up to facilitate dialogue. This collaboration roadmap will be accompanied by a call for stakeholder engagement which may be announced as early as 27 January 2013.
Advancing eHealth/IT Interoperability
This section will focus on ensuring interoperability of electronic health records. Work on this will continue throughout 2013 and it is expected that there will be a finalized pilot scheme for US-EU health records ready by May 2014.
eHealth/health IT workforce development
An assessment will be carried out in February 2013 on the current status and future trends in terms of eHealth capabilities of the healthcare workforce in both the EU and US. The promotion of new models of education may eventually be looked at in order to ensure eHealth literacy of healthcare professionals.
An expected outcome of this action plan is the running of pilot schemes which show innovative ways to update current education and content with an open repository of case studies, scenarios and educational materials. This is to be done, inter alia, by identifying ‘project champions’
Given the heavy focus of the Action Plan on education and that VPH is also envisaged for the training of healthcare workers, this scheme may provide an opportunity for VPH to advertise its work and for members to become involved as stakeholders.
We will monitor this closely and look for opportunities for VPH to become involved should this plan produce actionable outcomes.
The full draft Action Plancan be found here.
