Guest Editorial Special Issue on Emerging Health Telematics Applications in Europe

THROUGHOUT the world, information and communication technologies—telematics technologies—form the basis of a new area in the practice of medicine and the delivery of healthcare. It is characterized as a revolution based on information and the expression of human intelligence targeting to improve the efficiency and efficacy of healthcare delivery. Europe is actively participating in this revolution, both through national strategic plans as well as European initiatives, such as the research and development programs of the European Union (EU). The main objective of this Special Issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN BIOMEDICINE is to provide a snapshot of current European activities in health telematics. A total of 14 papers are published in this Special Issue and the December 1998 Special Issue under the following topics: Electronic Healthcare Records, Collaborative Technologies in Healthcare Delivery, Virtual Reality Applications in Medicine, and Healthcare Education. In this editorial, the papers are briefly introduced, together with a short reference on European past and current activities, outlining major challenges for wider implementation of health telematics applications and services in Europe, and the future trends. Rapid advances in information technology and telecommunications and their combination (telematics) are leading to the emergence of a new type of information infrastructure that has the potential of supporting an array of advanced services for healthcare. In Europe, during the last decade, information technologies have played a decisive role in the dramatic developments not only in diagnosis, treatment, surveillance, and rehabilitation of patients, but also on the side of the more collective aspects of healthcare and health prevention, such as clinical trials, epidemiology, and health education. In the constant competition for resources in the health sector, these new so-called telematics technologies and applications would not stand much chance if they were not intended to improve the quality of care, directly or indirectly, to help in the cost-containment and better management of the health sector, and to increase competitiveness of the health telematics industry. The case of quality improvement has long been proven by the older part of health telematics, medical informatics, which is the bread and butter of the clinical decision making process [1]. Among the many contributions of telematics applications to the quality of health delivery, we cannot overlook the new possibilities of fast access to vital patient data through sharable and secure electronic healthcare records (EHCR’s),