Towards Interoperability of eHealth System Networked Components

The growing number of patients with chronic diseases, the ageing population world wide, the rapid increase in hospital costs and in the cost of care personnel as well as the achieving medical objectives "increase the patient quality of life and survival" face Europe with a huge challenge. One of the solutions for reaching these challenges in the future is the deployment of complex eHealth systems in supporting information exchange between patients and healthcare providers. The eHealth systems architecture consists out of a series of components that are to be connected to each other. All these components have to be interoperable in order to reach a fully operational eHealth system. The interoperability is very difficult to achieve considering that the majority of components are designed and developed by various stakeholders. The paper does a thoroughly analysis of the interoperability state of the art concerning eHealth components. The results of the analysis indicates that the design and implementation of eHealth systems started to move slower into the right direction but without strong government or cross-border institutional regulations the objectives of obtaining a fully integrated and interoperable healthcare information infrastructure system is not possible.