GSO4SCHOOL Summer School 2020
The use of Information and Communie3zcation Technologies in healthcare (“eHealth”) can empower us to better manage health and disease, improve prevention, enable more accurate diagnosis and treatment and facilitate the communication between healthcare professionals and patients. eHealth can give more equal access to healthcare while facilitating patients’ access to health information.
The eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020 identified the lack of awareness of eHealth opportunities and challenges for users as one of the barriers to wider uptake of eHealth solutions. A Eurobarometer survey about eHealth was carried out in the 28 EU member states in September 2014 and 26,566 people were interviewed. The survey found that:
- Over 75% think the Internet is a good way of finding out more about health.
- 60% Europeans go online when looking for health information (almost 80% of 15-39 year-olds have done so, compared with less than 30% of people aged 55 and over).
- Nearly 90% of people who looked for health information online say they were satisfied with the information they found. Of the 10% who were not satisfied, roughly 50% say it was not reliable, 48% say it was commercially oriented and 46% it was not detailed enough.
- 80% of those surveyed said the information they found was useful and easy to understand.
After having searched online for health-related information, 47% of respondents spoke to friends or relatives and 40% made a doctor’s appointment.
Europeans’ digital health literacy was found to vary among EU states and also to depend on the level of education: while 71% of people who finished their education aged 20 or above mention having used the Internet to search for health-related information, only 23% of people who left school aged 15 or under say the same thing.
The European Commission is already funding projects to improve citizens’ health literacy as well as digital skills of healthcare professionals:
IROHLA focuses on improving health literacy for the older people in Europe by taking stock of on-going health literacy activities and making use of knowledge and experience of programmes in other sectors (e.g. private and social sectors) to be applied to the health sector.
ENS4Care aims at enhancing e-skills for nurses and social care workers and will provide evidence-based clinical guidelines for the deployment of eHealth services (such as guidelines on nurse ePrescribing, ICT enabled integrated care).
CAMEI will provide the ground for IT-skilled healthcare workforce in Europe and coordinate research activities and policies with the USA and establish a network of best practices in medical education informatics.
Under Horizon 2020, the European Commission will continue to fund projects, aiming specifically at improving citizens’ digital health literacy.
The full survey report can be found here.
Related posts
