With Europe’s population ageing rapidly and the demand for healthcare growing, healthcare services need to become more efficient. However, little hard evidence is available on the contribution of eHealth solutions. Now one EU project, eHealth Impact, has demonstrated that eHealth can provide enormous benefits – if the technology is properly implemented.

Electronically enhanced healthcare promises to reduce costs, improve quality and efficiency and treat more patients with the same resources. However, to date, no reliable data has been available to support this claim.

Now that data exists. The eHealth Impact project, which finished in May 2006, conclusively demonstrated that there is over a 2:1 ratio between economic benefits and costs. In other words, the benefits gained from implementing eHealth systems are more than two times greater than the additional cost of implementing them. “An eHealth system might cost more, but the benefits far outweigh the costs,” says Alexander Dobrev of the project team.

“But that ratio needs to be treated with caution,” he warns. “This is the cumulative average from ten of the best eHealth implementations we could find in Europe.”

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Patient Opinion is all about enabling (UK) patients to share their experiences of health care, and by doing so help other patients — and perhaps even change the NHS.

Patient Opinion is a revolutionary online system which allows anyone to share their experiences of receiving specialist treatment on the NHS.

Funded jointly by the Department of Health and South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority, Patient Opinion is a new non-profit company led by experienced GP and social entrepreneur, Dr. Paul Hodgkin. Based on his experience, and the service improvement requirements of the NHS, Dr. Hodgkin identified two major communication gaps which Patient Opinion will address:

• Patients and carers are now being provided with greater choice of specialist treatment options and locations - but they have little information on which options are best for them, without which choosing can be a lottery.
   
• The NHS has put in place lots of reporting and rating systems - but this formal ‘performance’ data seldom records the real experience of patients and carers.

Envision Solutions has published a new e-book that explains how to communicate about healthcare successfully in a world where social media is becoming increasingly influential. From Command & Control To Engage & Encourage focuses on how innovative healthcare industry players can integrate social media in their communications efforts:

“Currently, companies like Dell, Microsoft and GM are using social media technologies such as blogs to engage and communicate with their stakeholders. These corporations understand that social media has given the masses the power to significantly influence their economic fortunes.”

“Despite this shift in the communications landscape, many in the healthcare industry have been hesitant to do more than dip their toes into the social media ocean. They fear that engaging social media will require giving up control of their messages. However, the masses are already shaping perceptions of the healthcare industry. Individuals and organizations in this sector will have no choice but to develop a strategy for communicating effectively in a social media world.”

The e-book is available as a free download from the Envision Solutions web site.

(via the Business Innovation Insider)

The World Summit Award (WSA) is a global initiative to select and promote the world’s best e-content, started in 2003 in the framework of the United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

It is an Austrian initiative to make world leaders aware of the necessity to develop and invest in e-content in order to bridge the digital divide and the content gap.

The award is structured in eight categories: e-government, e-health, e-learning, e-entertainment, e-culture, e-science, e-business and e-inclusion.

Water Cooler Games is a site about videogames with an agenda. It is about games that go beyond entertainment. Water Cooler Games explores the emerging field of games want to do more than simply being fun: they want to make a point, share knowledge, change opinions. This includes new genres such as advergaming, newsgaming, political games, simulations and edutainment.

Water Cooler Games is edited by Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, two of the world’s leading videogame researchers and designers of videogames with an agenda.

How can we put the user of public eServices in the center of the designing and delivery of online public services and content?

The EU’s eUSER project wants to stimulate the availability and usage of useful and easy to use online public services.

The focus will be on the needs of citizens as users of online public services in their interactions with public administrations in general, in the management of their health and in furthering their education and developing their skills.

The project will prepare a state-of-the-art resource base on user needs in relation to online public services and on user-oriented methods for meeting these needs. It will then use this resource base to actively support the IST programme, projects, EU policy and the wider European Research Community to better address user needs in the design and delivery of online public services.

The project website already provides some very interesting statistics, country briefs and reports. Incidentally, the project is run in collaboration with the National Research Council Canada.

Read also this feature article, entitled “What users really want from online public services”, published on the IST Results website.

The province of Parma, in Italy, has launched a new project – the Pa.i.S (Partecipa il Sociale) plan – aimed at bringing the region’s public institutions closer to the daily lives of its citizens. Pa.i.S is co-financed by the Ministry for Innovation and Technology (MIT) and the National Centre for Informatics in Public Administration (CNIPA), as part of the ‘eDemocracy in the regions and local agencies’ action plan.

The Pa.i.S plan, run by the Health and Social Policy Directorate of the Province, has three main action lines aimed at providing the local authorities in the Province with concrete tools for developing alternative approaches to local administration which promote greater public participation.

These will include:

• the reinforcement and extension of the Sociale.Parma web portal, encouraging an evolution towards more active public participation;
• the Provincial Observatory of Social Policy (OPP-P); and
• the Laboratory of Participative Democracy (LAB).

These three actions are closely interlinked and based on a common theme – young people. The portal will include a forum, newsletter and various services aimed at nurturing greater public involvement in social policy. The Observatory will use new ICT tools to monitor public opinion on social policy with the objective of bringing it closer to the real needs of the people.

Finally, the ‘Laboratory’ will carry out experiments in participative democracy in three of the region’s local authorities (Fidenza, Colorno and Collecchio) using both traditional means and electronic tools. Each commune will, for example, select issues on which citizens will be invited to comment through an experimental eVote portal.

eGovernment News (20 February 2006)

The costs of health care have gradually been passed along to the end user; more and more, the information needed to manage our health is within easy reach as well, on the Internet.

The European Union, for instance, last month opened Health-EU Portal, an Internet gateway to reams of data and references on topics from alcohol to toy safety.

While what the site offers is certainly authoritative, don’t be misled by the consumer-friendly labels on the main page, like “My Health” and “My Lifestyle.” For the most part, within these categories you will not find personal health guidance but links to research data, rules and regulations or policy and process information.

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The digital strategy all but ignores older people says David Sinclair from the UK advocacy group Help the Aged and urges the government to correct this through specific targeted programmes for the population over 65 in UK.

Technology offers massive potential for tackling the problems faced by too many older people. It can help deliver better and more focussed services including those which help tackle isolation; poverty; and exclusion; whilst at the same time play a part in helping improve the health of older people.

However, whilst the potential of technology is enormous – it is limited by a large number of factors – imagination; the digital divide; age discrimination; inaccessible services; the lack of support to help older people use technology; the lack of awareness of older people’s issues by service providers and, most fundamentally a lack of involvement by older people in the design of e-services.

As a result, we as a society are missing the real opportunity which technology offers and as a result, older people are becoming more rather than less excluded as a result of the way technology is changing our lives and the public services we rely on. A survey we conducted last year revealed that more than 3 million older people (36 per cent) feel out of touch with the fast pace of modern life.

Only around one in five over 65s have ever used the internet. Most of concern is that the figures for over 65s has not increased over the past 3 years. The most recent figures actually show a fall. This highlights two issues – firstly that the market alone is not and will not deliver internet access for older people and secondly, that we cant just ignore this issue and hope it eventually solve itself. If we look at most other modern media technologies we see a similar pattern of usage – ie it declines with age.

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