Development of Health Care e-Services in the European Union

Development and implementation of e-services has become a common practice of state and public administrations in the developed countries around the world since the usage of information and communication technologies has enabled a faster processing of user applications and more efficient functioning of the service. This paper analyses the level of development of e-services in health care systems of eight European countries, both in terms of safety and reliability from the perspective of end users, i.e. citizens. Furthermore, the concept of trust in eservices based on the availability of information on the Internet on applied technological solutions, storage and data protection and their availability is considered. Implementation of services like e-health records and e-prescriptions requires a well-developed strategy and a very transparent way of their functioning because of the sensitive nature of health data. For this study official websites of the services were searched through, as were other sources on the Internet. The research results indicate a lack of certain key information, especially those related to data storage, their protection and long-term preservation.