EU Member States and Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway have adopted a common declaration on their commitment to pursue structured cooperation on cross-border electronic health services across Europe.
'By adopting today's Declaration, we seek to ensure that, in the future, electronic health services for Europe's citizens do not stop at national borders,' said the German State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Health, Dr Klaus Theo Schröder.
'We want to give patients access to their medical records and patient summaries from everywhere within the EU. This not only serves the continuity of care but also affords safety in an emergency,' he explained.
The declaration was adopted at the 2007 eHealth Conference whose theme 'From strategies to applications' looked at the implementation of electronic health-service applications and infrastructures such as electronic prescriptions and electronic patient files, as well as future services available thanks to the electronic health card.
The signature countries share the view that national e-health infrastructures are a prerequisite for the development of European cross-border electronic health services. So, national e-health road maps should be taken into account when planning the content-wide infrastructures.
The declaration also emphasises the need for more synergies between research and education and calls for a deployment strategy of new innovative e-health services.
The document also recommends that Member States work on common European standards together with the e-health industry to enable interoperability but also to open up new market opportunities in the field.
The declaration then proposes that the European Commission launch large-scale pilot projects to test European co-operation in the application of improved patient summaries in different health contexts, such as medical emergencies or the dispensing of prescriptions.