Development of Publicly Funded eHealth in Poland: Barriers and Opportunities

Abstract

IntroductioneHealth is a fast growing area of health care systems in many countries (Iakovidis et al., 2004), and expectations regarding diffusion and applications of eHealth are rising due to its cost-saving potential (Bell and Thornton, 2011; Kumar and Bauer, 2011).However, as Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of eHealth Task Force, stated: know that in health care we lag at least 10 years behind virtually every other area in the implementation of IT solutions. We know from a wide range of other services that information technology applications can radically revolutionise and improve the way we do things (European Commission, 2012a, p. 5).eHealth development is strongly supported by the European Commission (EC). This development is considered desirable because of its actual and expected impacts on public health (European Commission, 2013, 2014). The EC also funds substantial number of eHealth programmes. eHealth Network, established on the basis of the Article 14 of the Directive 2011/24/EU (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2011), supports coordination among member states, while programmes like European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing, the Horizon 2020 or the Digital Agenda provide funding for various eHealth-related ventures and investments (European Commission, 2014, 2015a), with strong hopes attached to RD Ministerstwo Rozwoju Regionalnego, 2012), policy makers in Poland connect it mainly to medical information systems (registration, databases etc.), while relatively little, if any, attention is given to technologies directly supporting clinical services delivery. Although it is clear that in documents issued by the European Commission telemedicine is considered a part of eHealth, in Poland the term is often used by public institutions and experts as if it were a separate category1. In these circumstances technologies such as telecare, teleconsultation, telemonitoring are classified under telemedicine, while ePrescriptions and eReferrals fall under eHealth (European Commission, 2004). In order to avoid the confusion, in this article we will use the broad understanding of eHealth that includes using information and communications technology (ICT) in health care (European Commission, n.d.).The aim of this paper is to establish to what extent and in what way eHealth development was taking place in Polish public health care and if there were any national policy targets or European targets influencing this development.The paper is based on the work carried out in the framework of the project: European Procurers Platform - eHealth - Transforming the market for eHealth Solutions (EPP-eHealth)2. The goal of the project is to transform the market for eHealth solutions through dialogue and innovation procurement. The project aims at understanding the opportunities that eHealth can offer and promotion of new approaches to collaborative procurement of eHealth solutions. The following paper is concerned with the public health care sector in Poland only.The first step to achieve the abovementioned aim was to understand the state-of-art of eHealth in the countries participating in the project (Denmark, Poland, Spain and the UK) as well as on the EU level. The presented paper shows the results of desk research studies and 4 interviews concerning Poland, conducted in spring 2015. Those methods were used to identify barriers to and opportunities for development of eHealth market specific to this country. …