A Book on How E-Health Can Materially Assist the Health Sector from the OECD.

This appeared a few days ago.

http://www.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/display.asp?sf1=identifiers&st1=812010071P1&LANG=EN

OECD Health Policy Studies

Improving Health Sector Efficiency

The Role of Information and Communication Technologies

 OECD Publishing Version: Print (Paperback) + Free PDF Price:  

Despite the promise they hold out, implementing information and communication technologies (ICTs) in clinical care has proven to be a very difficult undertaking. More than a decade of efforts provide a picture of significant public investments, resulting in both notable successes and some highly publicised costly delays and failures. This has been accompanied by a failure to achieve widespread understanding among the general public and the medical profession of the benefits of electronic record keeping and information exchange.  

With consistent cross-country information on these issues largely absent, the OECD has used lessons learned from case studies in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United States to identify the opportunities offered by ICTs and to analyse under what conditions these technologies are most likely to result in efficiency and quality-of-care improvements. The findings highlight a number of practices or approaches that could usefully be employed in efforts to improve and accelerate the adoption and use of these technologies.

Table of contents:

-Abbreviations

-Executive summary

-Introduction

Chapter 1. Generating Value from Health ICTs

Chapter 2. What Prevents Countries from Improving Efficiency through ICTs?

Chapter 3. Aligning Incentives with Health System Priorities

Chapter 4. Enabling a Secure Exchange of Information

Chapter 5. Using Benchmarking to Support Continuous Improvement

Annex A. Country case studies

-The Great Southern Managed Health Network (GSMHN) in Western Australia
-Physician Connect and the chronic disease management toolkit in British Columbia (Canada)
-The Massachusetts e-Health Collaborative in the United States
-Telestroke in the Baleares (Spain)
-E-prescription in Sweden
-Implementation of a Patient Summary Record System in  Twente (Netherlands)

 - Annex B. Project background and methodology

Really worth a browse. Just go to the look inside link (from the page mentioned here) and if you wish you can save the browsing version.

Really worthwhile in general terms!

David.