Cross-Border Experiences in Health IT: What Are the Requests for the Medical Record? Opportunities and Emerging Issues

Abstract

EU directive enables free flow of patients among member countries, where they should receive safe and quality healthcare. In spite of some limitations (transplantation, vaccinations, hospital and expensive healthcare), directive opens the borders to foreign health service providers and represents a big challenge to healthcare system. Member states should facilitate cooperation in cross-border healthcare provision at regional and local level. Cross-border collaboration offers the potential to improve the performance of health systems at local, regional and national level, improving access and sharing experiences. However, there are many challenges to use and successfully implement offered and available potentials. According to the literature, these challenges can be grouped into legal, sustainability, cultural and contextual factors. While we concentrate in this text more on legal and contextual factors, this does not mean that the other two are less important. Problems with information and communication technology are often mentioned in combination with cross-border healthcare. It is a question whether issues like level of digitalisation, interoperability of information systems and e-health technologies and similar can be actually defined as problems. The technology is there and exists; it has been used in many other areas of our life, like banking. The background reasons why such technology is not sufficiently used in healthcare are a consequence of legal, financial and organisational questions. In spite of these challenges, the area of cross-border cooperation in healthcare develops. In this article the successful examples and projects of cross-border cooperation are presented. Some of them were carried out at a wider scale (European level), whereas others try to promote cooperation in neighbouring border areas in two countries. Health platform is presented as a way to continue cross-border cooperation at a higher level, which still does not live in practice but has potential to help assuring quality and safe healthcare for the EU citizens in the future.