eHealth Conference 2006

On 10 May 2006 Dr. Cabrnoch participate on international eHealth Conference held in Málaga, Spain. He presented his speech called "Better Communication: A Way to Better Health" on the workshop "eHealth in an enlarged Europe: A universe of opportunities". Attached you find Dr. Cabrnoch´s speech and also the programme of whole event.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am really honored to have the opportunity to address this assembly. I am proud that I have this chance to speak as a member of the European Parliament. I am one of the first 24 members who were elected to the European Parliament in the Czech Republic, one of the 10 new member countries.

We are dealing with health care policy every single day not only in the European parliament, the European Union, but also in every country all around the world. Every single country I have visited is not satisfied with its social security system and all of them are putting into place health care reforms. These reforms are looking for answers how to face common important challenges.

Nowadays the health systems have to deal with the ageing of the population, the lower birthrate, new technologies in prevention, diagnostics and care as well as higher expectations of the citizens and their better knowledge. Europe is dealing especially with the mobility of patients and health care workers, which is a growing challenge for the health care systems, particularly for communication among the health care providers and patients and sharing information in health care.

It is obvious that the social security systems are not able to cover all the expectations of citizens and all possibilities of the health services, such as new vaccinations, drugs, pioneering operations, tissue, cell and genetic methods. I believe that the only realistic solution for future health care is to strengthen the role of patients. Research and development in technical and social sciences and pharmaceuticals etc. is bringing a lot of new opportunities for health care. The gap between the possibilities of medicine and science on one hand and the abilities of national social security systems to provide this for everyone on the other is increasingly getting wider. Only the citizen as a patient has the right to decide which care he is going to demand.


The patient must take serious decisions. He or she must be ready to take the responsibility for those decisions. The patient is able to take responsible decisions only if he or she has the required information available at the right place and time. The natural interest of every patient is to obtain the highest possible quality health care. Having the appropriate information the patient takes automatically the essential part of control on the quality of health care. Nowadays we can see a high growth of so called patient orientated information systems. I would like to mention a very successful project form the Czech Republic, my home country. This project, that provides the access to the patient health care information on the web, is so fare being used by almost one million citizens and more than eight thousand doctors.
The database consists of almost four million patient records. This project of patient health records will be presented at this conference later today in session II. The doctors and other health care workers need information for their decisions as well.

In order to have quality health care, it is important to have:

• qualified medical staff, which provides the medical care;
• quality of the medical equipment, through which the care is provided;
• and information, which the doctor has at his disposal at the time and place when making a decision.

The modern ways of communication in health care enable all of us to share the information and use it at that moment when the decision is being made. The sharing of information is the condition of the effective use of the resources that each country has at its disposal for health care. It is clear that it is beneficial to share individual medical information.
It is neither possible, nor effective, correct and secure for the patient, to repeat all examinations, lab tests, x-rays ect. every time before making every single decision. It is therefore necessary that the information, once it comes into existence, is made available for the making of the next decision. When dealing with personal health data, we must consider the issue of data privacy. Health data is an extremely sensitive type of personal information. It is our obligation to set clear rules for dealing with it. We have to decide, who and under which conditions should have access to this personal health data.

The European Parliament in its resolutions puts the accent on prevention. The prevention of diseases is always more effective than treatment following an illness. As the old saying goes: Prevention is better than cure€ť. Under prevention we often think only prevention of illnesses. However there are not only illnesses, there are unfortunately also medical mistakes, which cause damage to health and even death. Better communication and sharing of information can actually help to prevent these mistakes. We should be more orientated towards health promotion and education.

Another current challenge we have to face is the free movement of citizens within the European Union. We can assume that the people will demand health care in other countries. Not only from that point of view e-health enables the improvement of health care quality. The health insurance card is an important instrument for dealing with patient mobility.
There are some countries where the cards are already being used. The so called Smartcard will bring much greater benefit. This Smartcard is going to be not only the health data carrier, but also the patient€™s identifier in his or her social security system as well as the secure key for authorized access to the patient health care information database.

The essential requirement for e-health is interoperability. The single information system must be based on a compatible data format. The information in one system must be accessible to other information systems. The responsibility of the European Union in the area of interoperability is essential and any delay is unacceptable. Our main objective must therefore be the interoperability of e-health. This is why I would like to appeal to you, ministers of health and informatics of all member countries, to take immediate action. This conference could become the forum that will fundamentally take e-health forward to achieve better interoperability. Interoperability enables sharing of valuable medical data. Exploring this data brings higher quality in health care; which is of a significant benefit to all of us.