Study goals

It is the overall context of the study to identify the promising opportunities of eHealth in addressing the challenges of European healthcare systems. With the increasing political engagement at EU and Member State level, the EHR IMPACT study makes a substantial contribution towards accelerating the implementation of the European eHealth Action Plan. In this way, it supports Member States in guarding the European common values and principles and meeting the key challenges of Member States’ health systems.

Specifically,

the study supports actively the ongoing initiatives and implementation work on interoperable EHR and ePrescribing systems by improving awareness of benefits and widely spreading new knowledge about the socio-economic impact and lessons learnt from successful implementations.

The value added by eHealth is measured quantitatively for ten successful EHR and ePrescribing investments. These cover a wide variety of applications in healthcare provider organisations and health systems, and of local, regional or even national frameworks. Individual examples provide insights on success factors, requirements, timescales and net benefits. The aggregation of results will enable high level conclusions to be drawn.
The final results of the study will be published in a report including a brief to EU and Member State policy makers. It will emphasise the net benefits and address the need to improve awareness of the type and scale of benefits from implementing interoperable electronic health record and ePrescribing systems.