The European Commission is proposing ambitious, wide-ranging public investments in digital technologies that will allow it to tackle looming challenges, including the support of an aging population and limiting health care costs.
As part of a decade-long action plan, the EC has proposed establishing a number of major pilots throughout the European Union that will lead to all Europeans having secure, online access to their medical health data by 2015. The plan also calls for widespread deployment of telemedicine services by 2020.
As the precursor to all of this, the EC is also proposing that a minimum, common set of patient data be defined that will allow patient records to be accessed or exchanged electronically across all of the EU's 27 member states by 2012.
The EC digital plan comes as Europe is facing huge economic and social problems, which officials say can't be addressed without information and communication technologies (ICTs).
"The crisis has wiped out years of economic and social progress (and) has exposed the structural weaknesses in Europe's economy," said Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for the digital agenda, in a May 25 speech to the World Congress on Information Technology in Amsterdam. "Without proper use of ICTs over the next decade, Europe will become a broken economy."
The bills in the inbox now and those on the way -- including health care -- "are too big to pay," she said.
With life expectancy rising and the cost of new treatments also increasing, who will pay for it? There are four people working today for every person who is retired, she said, but in 2050 that will be down to two workers for every retiree. Even if the money could be found to pay, who will do the work?
"Telemedicine, electronic patient records, ambient assisted living, interoperable devices -- the answers are in front of us," Kroes said.
However, there are significant barriers in the way of this vision, outside of the political and budgetary challenges. Some 30 percent of Europeans have never used the Internet, according to the EC, and overall Europe has only a 1 percent penetration of high-speed fiber networks. And EU spending on ICT research and development is just 40 percent of that in the United States.
To bolster the basic infrastructure needed to meet these challenges, the EC has outlined a seven-point strategy that includes such things as creating a single digital market for the whole of the EU, improving interoperability, boosting the trust and security of the Internet, and guaranteeing the provision of much faster Internet access to its citizens.
