On a positive note, there are enormous cost-saving elements of e-health. Per country, these can amount to tens of billions of dollars, and in the larger countries to hundreds of billions.
The main impediment to the introduction of e-health has been the powerful vested interests within the industry. For whatever reasons, they have persistently rejected any development in integrated patient-related e-health services.
In the US, medical accountability is becoming more and more of an issue and only an e-health system can provide the level of transparency required of the healthcare process. The current largely manual and paper-based files and computerised processes have no standards and it is simply impossible to use all the information in any coherent way.
Imagine if other sectors – finance or transport, for example – were managed in this way. We would have financial collapse and transport chaos.
With e-health now becoming a serious government policy issue there will be no turning back; over the next decade the system will be changed beyond recognition – and for the better.