engleski

Building sustainable digital health services in Europe: lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 has posed significant challenges and has highlighted many weaknesses in the health and social care systems of countries around the world. Faced with an international public health emergency a nation’s ability to generate, share and use reliable information efficiently and across national borders in a timely manner has been shown to be of critical importance. However, the majority of public health systems have been found to be lacking the level of digital data structuring, necessary infrastructure and operational systems and processes to do so. On the one hand, the pandemic has placed pressure on all agencies and building blocks of a health system: governance, financing, service delivery, medicines and equipment, health workforce and health information. On the other hand, the same challenges faced by healthcare systems at a time of extreme crisis have proven to be an outstanding driver of change. On the 15th of September 2020, the Croatian Ministry of Health, the Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support and the Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations of the European Commission organised a workshop "Building survivable eHealth strategies during crisis" to share the knowledge on how to develop a resilient eHealth strategy for the 2021-2027 Multiannual Financial Framework. The workshop gathered a broad range of digital health experts from national health ministries, health care facilities, informatics, including representatives of EU funded projects. This paper presents several eHealth innovations developed and used at local and national levels to help coping with the COVID-19 world pandemic in spring 2020 and provides a handful of practical recommendations and action points to the EU and national stakeholders.

digital health services ; COVID-19 pandemic ; recommendations

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