Funding programmes: Joint Action under the EU Public Health Programme and Thematic Network under the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme-ICT strand.
Total funding available: EUR 2.500.000 (1.500.000 EC Contribution)
The eHealth Governance Initiative (eHGI) was set up in 2009 built on the political document “Council Conclusions on a Safe and efficient healthcare through eHealth”, adopted by the EPSCO Council on 1 December 2009 and formalised in 2011 with the support of two different EU financing instruments: a Joint Action through the Public Health Programme and a Thematic Network through the CIP-ICT programme.
The eHGI is aims at establishing an efficient, appropriately governed and sustainable platform to enable EU Member States and stakeholders to further develop cooperation on eHealth issues to help implement and deploy interoperable eHealth services across Europe.
The eHGI will work very closely with the High-Level-eHealth-Governance-Group (State Secretaries and Director Generals) also called Network Art. 14 (of the Directive 2011/24/EU) to ensure effective links and synergies between the political decision making level and the results of more technically oriented work. As such the eHGI will support the setup of a European eHealth environment for the benefit of European patients, e.g. support and guidance for implementation, deployment and use of eHealth services throughout national health care systems, increasing patient safety and quality, better use of health care resources).
The initial set of issues identified by the project can be classified under three components, Trust and Acceptability (Users’ Perspective); Interoperability, Standards and Market; and Legal Privacy and Data Protection.
The Role of EPF
EPF is co-leader of the Work Package dedicated to Trust and Acceptability whose general objective is to provide stakeholders' representatives with the means and the opportunities to discuss and identify possible ways to enhance eHealth users’ trust and acceptability and make proposals to EU Member States, representatives as well as to the European Commission, as appropriate, on how the needs of users should be best taken into account in the development of European and national eHealth strategies.