In 2004, Europeans made approximately 180 million trips of four nights or more outside their own country. Ensuring their access to seamless and safe healthcare has become a top priority for the European Commission. Information and communication technology plays a key role in this process as it facilitates the transfer of vital medical data across borders. So far, national health IT solutions have coexisted without any interaction. The EC funded Smart Open Services project will for the first time unite key Member States and industry players in a joint effort to get medical data and prescription information to any doctor in the Union – when and where it is needed, and in comprehensible form.

The EC Large Scale Pilot in eHealth aims to develop