ICT and Telemedicine: Overview of Telemedicine in Europe

In this post I would like to briefly talk about the recent development of telemedicine in Europe. The telemedicine market in Europe is a fragmented and it grows at a slower rate than that of the U.S. market¹. The major hurdle of the development of telemedicine in Europe is the lack of standard regulation – each member country has its own laws and regulations regarding the practice of telemedicine¹. Some of the major restraints to the growth of telehealth markets in Europe include lack of concrete laws and regulations¹.

However, recently EU members have been striving to cooperate and collaborate to establish unified and efficient telemedicine services, aiming to deploy telehealth in every home in Europe by 2012¹. One attempt was the formation of European Patient Smart Open Services (epSOS)¹. It is a cross boarder telehealth project that linked 27 beneficiaries from 12 EU member countries¹. The goal was to build an infrastructure and framework through which patients’ health information, medical history, and prescription from different EU member states could be shared¹.

Another recent project was called the Renewing Health, a large-scale pilot project that involved nine European regions². This project was launched on February 1, 2011, with the goal to make telemedicine as a routine care for patients with chronic disease by generating data for European healthcare systems². There are 8,000 patients involved in this project including intervention groups such as cardiovascular disease (CVD), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and diabetes². The nine regions are Veneto region in Italy, South Karelia in Finland, Southern Denmark, Northern Norway, Catalonia in Spain, central Greece, Norrbotten in Sweden, Carinthia in Austria and Berlin in Germany².

There are more initiatives of telemedicine development in EU and the following videos illustrate these ideas and projects.

USACE Renovates Hospitals for Unique Telemedicine Program in Albania