Challenge

Personalised eHealth services have significant potential to help patients manage their health and enable professionals to deliver more coordinated care. Yet their wider adoption across Europe remains constrained by fragmented markets, incompatible systems, uncertain legal frameworks and reimbursement models that do not adequately support digital or self-managed care. Healthcare organisations also need stronger operational and financial support to redesign services around patients and multidisciplinary care teams.

Solutions

The EU-funded eHealth Innovation (eHI) Thematic Network brought together 22 partners: 20 from 10 EU Member States and two from Switzerland, to develop a shared understanding of how personalised, interoperable eHealth services could be expanded across Europe. The network included public authorities, technology and pharmaceutical companies, solution providers, researchers, healthcare professionals, patients, insurers and sector associations.

eHI examined emerging practices for reorganising healthcare and patients, connected professionals and the meaningful exchange for health information. Its work focused on services that support virtual and multidisciplinary teams, patient self-management, shared decision-making and more responsive communication between patients and professionals. Stakeholders also explored practical barriers involving interoperability, procurement, financing, reimbursement, regulation and organisational change.

Results

The network established a broad stakeholder consensus on the measures needed to move personalised eHealth services from isolated initiatives towards wider deployment. It identified critical success factors such as actively involving people in managing their health, improving interactive communication, supporting shared doctor-patient decisions and strengthening coordination across health and social care.

By bringing technical, clinical, organisational and policy perspectives into the same discussion, eHI provided guidance for developing scalable services and a more supportive European eHealth infrastructure. Its findings helped clarify how funding mechanisms, legal certainty, interoperable systems and organisational structures must work together to make patient-centered digital care part of routine service delivery.