A Smart Cross Border e-Gov Primary Health Care Medical Service

Abstract

Nearly two years ago, the European Commission of the European Union provided to the Authorities of Member States the appropriate regulation and systems for the development of services necessitating cross border transactions. So far, unfortunately, Member States have shown certain reluctance. This may be justified particularly for systems involving processes or necessitating transfers of confidential and personal data. Nevertheless, the proposed by the European Commission systems guarantee (as far as recent developments in network and cloud securities can do it) efficient validation of data, through authentication procedures. On the other hand, in Europe, cannot be ignored the accumulated and increased interest by Public Administrations and Organizations’ of public and private interest in using systems of cross border nature. This tendency is quite justified by citizens increased mobilization, from one State to another. No need to notice that free movement of the Europeans is one of the basic principles of the European Union! All this effort has led literature to the presentation of a few systems of cross border nature for health, social services, environment and life sciences, in general.

In this paper, a cross border authentication service linking primary health units of public or private status is proposed. This service, at its final implementation, will fully exploit, freely available by the European Commission, platforms. By now, the first phase of this service, a local primary health care system, securing access to medical records of citizens moving throughout Europe, is used by public, primary health service units of Greece. The full satisfaction of this service will allow its proposition as a standard to interested Member States. At a later stage, module systems, similar to the proposed ones, will be nodes of the joining in organizations to a European Smart Cross Border Primary Health Care System.