Abstract
eHealth offers enormous benefits to revolutionise health services, deliver better public services and tackle social challenges. Using eHealth can lead to several benefits, notably, the improvement of the quality, access and efficacy of healthcare such as reductions in clinical errors, cost-savings, improved quality of care, avoidance of unnecessary tests, improved work efficiency, reduced waiting times and improvement in the overall efficiency of the healthcare system. Although benefits exists, healthcare organizations have experienced difficulties attaining them and overall adoption of eHealth remains slow. Some of the challenges that is slowing the widespread adoption of eHealth are the technologies unintended and adverse effects on health professionals workflow, legal barriers, fears of depersonalization of healthcare services, high financial costs and difficulties associated with implementing a new system, and uncertainty that the technology may actually reduce overall costs. The coordination of care across boundaries presents a plethora of issues that need to be tackled from a policy, legal, practical research perspective.
This thesis attempts to address pressing issues with a particular focus on the implications health information exchange for the purposes of coordinating care will have on both the patient and healthcare professionals on three levels: international, national and institutional level.
The findings of this thesis imply that in order for cross-border health information exchange to be successful, national level policies, legislations and directives need to be uniformly implemented, harmonized and enforced. This includes those related to patients’ rights, privacy, certification of patient record related software, public information, digital signatures and security requirements.
Based upon the findings of the studies conducted presented herein, the author emphasises that the coordination of care via electronic data exchange can be successful but that several challenges need to be addressed.
This thesis attempts to address pressing issues with a particular focus on the implications health information exchange for the purposes of coordinating care will have on both the patient and healthcare professionals on three levels: international, national and institutional level.
The findings of this thesis imply that in order for cross-border health information exchange to be successful, national level policies, legislations and directives need to be uniformly implemented, harmonized and enforced. This includes those related to patients’ rights, privacy, certification of patient record related software, public information, digital signatures and security requirements.
Based upon the findings of the studies conducted presented herein, the author emphasises that the coordination of care via electronic data exchange can be successful but that several challenges need to be addressed.
| Original language | English |
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| Publisher | Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen |
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| Number of pages | 208 |
| Publication status | Published - 2014 |
Keywords
- Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences
- health information exchange
- eHealth
- e-health
- health information technology
- Privacy
- Security
- care coordination
- Policy
- interoperability
- clinical information systems
- Faculty of Science
- health information exchange
- eHealth
- health information technology
- Privacy
- Security
- clinical information systems
- interoperability
