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The European Commission recently organised a high level ministerial conference on ehealth in Brussels under the title eHealth 2003: The Contribution of ICT to Health. The objectives of the conference were to provide European Health Ministers and the health public sector in general with validated information on which key implementation decisions on ehealth may be made and to reinforce the implementation and deployment of ehealth systems by European health service providers.

Among thirty ehealth projects and applications that were presented at the conference and exhibition (and that were previously selected through a call), four eEurope awards for ehealth were awarded in the categories:

• national or regional ehealth networks and services;
• hospital ehealth systems;
• telemedicine and home care ehealth applications; and
• empowering citizens in management of health and well being.

The winners were:

• SJUNET (National IT Infrastructure for Healthcare) from Sweden;
• COHERENCE (Information System for Successful Hospital Restructuring) from France;
• EVISAND (Virtual Environment for Healthcare) from Spain; and
• NHS Direct (NHS Direct online website) from UK.

The participating Health Ministers from 33 countries recognised that ehealth applications can promote quality of and enhance efficiency in healthcare, shared the view that citizen involvement should be facilitated through widespread access to high quality information, and agreed to share experiences on the utilsation, efficiency and impact of ehealth applications. They supported concerted actions to address particularly the development of standards enabling interoperability of diverse systems and services and to especially explore the possibilities of open source
applications for achieving this objective.

The report of the conference and the full Ministerial Declaration (as a PDF file) can be found on the European Commission, Information Society website:
http://europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/ehealth/conference/2003/index_en.htm