Sustainable development in the e-health sector of the European union

Abstract

Sustainable development in the sector of e-Health is a complex and multidisciplinary task, which consolidates the fields of information and communication technologies (ICT) as well as that of health care. ICT have an enormous potential that can be employed in the health-care system in order to help medical practitioners and patients alike, as well as to ensure a safer, higher-quality, more rational, and better integrated health-care system. e-Health describes the use of ICT over a wide spectrum of health-care system functions. Innovative and well-thought-out applications utilising this new technology may be able to increase the consistency, reliability, and quality of information delivered. In order to track the quality of e-Health use in the EU Member States, the European Commission has created a framework utilising various indicators of e-Health. As a possible remedy to the issue, the use of the statistical I-distance method has been here proposed and applied to a dataset comprised of 29 European countries (Norway and Iceland have also been included). Further on, the results presented in this study clearly demonstrate the importance of several indicators thereof as being crucial in defining the underlying dynamics of e-Health use patterns.