eHEALTH

eHEALTH includes the application of ICT (information and communications technologies) across the whole range of functions that affect the health sector.
 
eHealth systems include tools for health authorities and professionals, from national to International, from the doctor to the hospital manager, nurses, data processing specialists, social security administrators and - of course - the patients, as well as personalized health systems for individuals and community.

Examples include health information networks, electronic health records, telemedicine services, personal wearable and portable communicable systems including those for medical implants, health portals, and many other ICT-based tools assisting disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, health monitoring and lifestyle management (this description is based on text at the Europe's Information Society eHealth portal).

One of the major problems identified in healthcare services is the lack of ICT standards especially for interoperability related to the eHealth area. ETSI is addressing this issue.

ETSI Project eHEALTH co-ordinates ETSI's activities in the Information Communication Technology (ICT).

Vital aspects to be considered by EP eHealth are:
• Security of systems and data
• Quality of services
• Interoperability and validation by testing
• Usability

ETSI eHEALTH collects Health ICT related requirements from relevant stakeholders to input them to the ETSI Technical Committee that covers that area. Work is also done to identify gaps where existing ETSI standards do not fulfil the Health ICT requirements.
EP eHEALTH is working on a number of issues carried out in the scope of a wider collaboration between the 3 European Standards Organisations (ESOs) (CEN, CENELEC, ETSI).This joint project is called ‘eHealth-INTEROP' and addresses the requirements of the European Commission mandate to the European Standards Organisations (ESOs) on standardisation in the field of e-health (M/403). This mandate M/403 aims to provide a consistent set of standards to address the needs of this rapidly-evolving field for the benefit of future healthcare provision.
The future work of EP eHEALTH on M/403 will be to develop phase 2 proposals on testing specifications and interoperability issues.

EP eHEALTH has developed an initial report in developing eHealth user service models. These models address interoperable solutions for healthcare data collection, transmission, storage and interchange with the required security, privacy and reliability.

The next step of this work will be to develop requirements and service architecture to provide improved eHealth services involving the relevant stakeholders, including users, medical professionals etc. eHealth systems contribute to user ubiquitous access to more cost effective healthcare services irrespective to location.

The following is a list of recently published and frequently downloaded standards. Please use the ETSI Work Programme to find further related standards.