Strategies and Solutions in eHealth: a Literature Review

This study has three purposes: first, to provide a synthetic, up-to-date overview of the main emerging strategies for the health care sector in the Western developed countries; second, to understand the possible role of eHealth solutions in each of these emerging strategies; third, to understand how these emerging health care strategies and emerging eHealth solutions may be usefully applied to address one of the most important challenges for health care systems, i.e. population ageing. The overview on emerging strategies and emerging eHealth solutions provided here is based on a literature review including a wide spectrum of recent documents published on the Web about health care and eHealth. The outcome of this document search is a concept matrix linking emerging health care strategies and emerging eHealth solutions. This concept matrix is used as a framework to synthetically describe how eHealth initiatives are perceived by different stakeholders, such as investors, policy makers, insurance companies, PA bodies, researchers and academics, health care professionals, patients.