Recommendations for International Action: Barriers to a Global Information Society for Health

A Global Information Society could bring enormous benefits to world health. Individuals could be immensely empowered by access to knowledge throughout the world on their health, life-style, ailments, diseases and disabilities, medicines and treatment protocols. Clinical professionals could gain by access to a vast range of international knowledge bases for education and training, to virtual electronic libraries, evidence based practice, outcomes and research results. They will be able to consult remotely with colleagues around the world and relay their expertise to any corner of the globe. Researchers could also benefit by increased electronic collaboration between colleagues. However, whilst such immense benefits can readily be predicted, their realization on a global scale is another matter. This book reports the results of the G8-ENABLE project. G8-ENABLE was funded by the EU Commission. Its task has been to identify the barriers to a Global Information Society for Health, to make recommendations on actions that need to be taken to overcome these barriers, and to identify sources of good information. The major barriers dealt with in this report lie in the generic areas of protecting health information, data meanings and database navigation, ownership and legal accountability and access to networking and messaging standards. The recommendations formulated in this report are of great value for all key policy makers involved in enabling the global information infrastructure for health.