eHealth tools for patients and professionals in a multicultural world.

In many countries today, an important challenge for health care is the fact that the population is mixed as regards cultural background and not the least with regard to preferred language. In our country Sweden almost 20% of the population has some connection to another country and many patients seeking health care do not have sufficient mastering of the dominant Swedish language to get optimal care. We propose in this study a set of eHealth services that could be implemented within a country and in multinational co-operation to deal with some of these issues in an effective way which both empowers the citizens, improves patient safety and at the same time may offer cost savings for the publicly financed health care systems in the countries of the European Union. The basic idea is to use a set of people-people communication strategies using ICT tools combined with semantic tools for information sharing and conversion. This requires new and challenging organizational contexts.

Capturing business requirements for the Swedish national information structure.

As a subproject for the National Information Structure project of the National Board of Health and Welfare, four different stakeholder groups were used to capture business requirements. These were: Subjects of care, Health professionals, Managers/Research and Industry. The process is described with formulating goal models, concept, process and information models.

The development of a Swedish National Information Structure.

Sweden has as part of its national eHealth strategy decided to develop a generic National Information Structure. It is based on three models: The Generic Process, Concepts and Information model. The models are intended to be specialised for various forms of care including social and community care. The importance of interacting models developed in an iterative approach with user involvement is emphasised.

Procurement of prescriber support systems.

Supporting the process of medication selection and electronic management of prescriptions is a high priority issue in the eHealth strategies of many countries today. Procuring such systems can be quite difficult, especially if one should encourage suppliers from different countries to participate. The new ISO Technical Report 22,790 provides a new approach to facilitate this process by giving an international basis for specifying the functional characteristics desired. The paper describes the content of the report and discusses the procurement process in the light of the European public procurement directive and patient safety.