An increasing ageing population is putting a great strain on public healthcare resources. As Europe's baby boomers - those born in the 1950s and early 1960s - become senior citizens, costs are expected to escalate. Like with other public services, budgets continue to be constrained. So the pressure is on governments and healthcare systems to invest in solutions that improve productivity and efficiency, and drive down costs while giving better healthcare to an increasing number of people.
Healthcare institutions today want to provide patients with a consistent level of care throughout their lives. The target is to achieve what is called Integrated Patient Care, where all levels of patient care are connected - from family doctor to specialist. This means linking up the various departments across different care institutions so that patient records are accessible at every stage. The challenge is that each of these areas of care has its own way of working, and its own information management systems and processes.
Governments in Europe spend around 8 percent GDP on providing citizens with healthcare. Patients are living longer and have increased expectations of the healthcare they should be receiving. Most countries' public health services are under pressure to reduce administrative costs and divert the savings to diagnosis, therapy and preventative care. In addition, staff may be averse to adopting new on-line processes that could help ease the administration burden as they fear it could be too disruptive. And both healthcare providers and patients may have concerns that making more processes electronic - especially patient records - can increase the likelihood of breaches in patient confidentiality and security of data.
Post-operative patients often require close monitoring to ensure long-tem recovery and prevent any post surgical complications. This is often done with an extended stay in hospital followed. Keeping someone in a hospital bed is costly; beds need to be freed up for patients waiting for operations.
Ensuring that healthcare professionals are kept fully up-to-date with developments in clinical information, procedures, practices and research is one of the key challenges confronting healthcare management. Increasingly knowledgeable and sophisticated patients, who expect to play a far more active role in their choice of therapies, and are able to engage in a more informed dialogue with their physicians, further intensify the challenge.