OECD and European Commission: Estonia is in first place in Europe ahead of Denmark, Sweden and Finland for availability and usage of e-health services

The OECD and the European Commission have published a report on a comparative analysis of ICT implementation and adoption in healthcare systems, where Estonia took the top spot among 30 countries. The study project “Benchmarking ICTs in health systems”, initiated by the OECD in 2010, covered 1753 hospitals in 27 European Union member states and Croatia, Norway and Iceland.

The report put Estonia in first place ahead of Denmark in the eHealth availability and use category, with Sweden in third, Finland in fourth and Great Britain in fifth. Estonia’s strong position is based on good infrastructure and the digital processing of health data. This category assessed not only the infrastructure and the digital exchange of medical data, but also ICT solutions, security and privacy in European hospitals. The category assessment involved the comparison of four e-health functions in a hospital: data entry by the hospitals and data viewing in the health infosystem; the existence of the necessary clinical decision support; digital information exchange between hospitals; and telemedicine.