European countries have dealt with telemedicine and health telematics with some delay. The EC starts planning and co-ordinating research and technological development (Rst) in 1984 joining them in frame programs renewing every four years. The first one (1984-1987) mainly joins trends of community research. The second Rst program (1987-1991) aims to settle the technologies of future, especially dealing with the information technology and electronics fields also oriented to industries and to the employed materials. It is allocated a 20 millions ECU financing for an exploratory medicine program called Aim (Advanced Informatics in Medicine).43 proposals out of 200 passed and have been financed. Ended the “exploratory phase”, Aim passes to a more advanced and less theoretical phase and it is introduced into the fourth Rst frame program (1990-1994), along with a more general telematics sub-program called Stig. The fourth Rst frame program is developed paying ever more attention to activities concerning the diffusion of the research results, technologies and natural science and also to the training and mobility of researches. In the Aim “main phase”, 37 projects out of 193 are deemed as deserving financing. More than 90 millions ECU are allocated. The 37 projects cluster a wide number of research, industry and health participants. Program concerns telemedicine technical services, images analysis and telecommunication, hospitals and first-aids telematic integration, computer diagnostics, homogeneous medical reports drawing up. Within the third frame program other community projects are started-off concerning information technologies also referring to the health field. They are Esprit, Biomed (about biomedicine and health) and Race (Research and development in Advanced Communication technologies in Europe). Within the last one there are two special medical experimentation projects, Telemed and Multimed, being allocated part of the community allocation (nearly 380 millions ECU) previously reserved to general telematic services. Starting off the fourth Rst frame program (1994-1998), some researching sub-programs changed their name. Stig, for example, became Tap (Telematics application program) achieving an 841 millions ECU financing. And within it the Aim turns into Healthcare telematics, with 150 millions ECU financing. The Esprit program orients ever more to the information technology (It) and Race becomes Acts (Advanced Communication Technologies and Services). It is oriented to the study and experimentation of new technologies by involving final users and trials of results. It has 630 millions ECU financing on disposal. Finally biomedicine and health projects are collected under the name of Biomed 2. The fourth program is divided into 5 phases. The first one concerns the study of users' requirements. The second one the turning of these requirements into functional specifications. The third one a prototype construction of an application developed within a project. Fourth phase, the homologation of the prototype by the means of experimentation with users in real situations. The last step consists of an elaboration of a plan to employ the achieved results into practice. The Healthcare Telematics projects gravitate towards five great topics, first of which regards the multimedia medical documentation. Then it is considered the growth of the resources on disposal for medical professions and the health services organization bettering. Third experimentation field is telemedicine and new applications of telematics. The fourth one regards the information services for citizens and health operators and the last one concerns special problems inherent the medical telematics. The fifth Rst frame project (1998-2002) started-off with a 14.960 millions Euro and differs a lot from the others. It aims to solve problems of research and technologic development and to give an answer to the social and economic challenges Europe must face. Health telematics national initiatives have been carried out by Great Britain, where it has been published a white book about the new National Health Service (Nhs) and an information strategy report. Furthermore it has been settled a Nhs-net within which regional nets link. In France there is a national Intranet system, approaching it by a card. Germany too allows the services admittance with a health card. In Holland a sizeable part of the family doctors interchange data in a structured way. Greece puts on disposal telemedicine for isolated patients and in Denmark there is a message national service for health operators and a central computerised register of hospital admittance. It can be said that the possibilities of further telemedicine and health telematics development are many since the introduction in market of the systems at matter goes from 0,8 to 1,2%, as to other sectors where investments in telematics reach the 3,5% of the whole. Furthermore in Europe there are 2 millions health professionals, 300 thousand cure centres to connect, 15 thousand hospitals, 100 millions houses, 380 millions potential users. Those data allow conjecturing that for the next ten years it is surely foreseeable a growth of the medicine applications market.

A cura di TIMED

   Leadership Medica^® 
  Mensile di scienza  medica e attualita` 
 Copyright 1997© All Rights Reserved