Overall Project Description

In most European countries, healthcare is fundamentally public funded and mostly public provided. Healthcare spending represents a major component of state budgets and currently it ranges between 5 and 10% of GDP in the EU Member States .
In an economic climate in which resources seem unlimited and real alternatives scarce, the healthcare systems of the Member States - and of the developed countries in general - have grown beyond what is sustainable in a climate of prolonged recession and in the framework of the Stability Pact, which imposes severe restrictions on public spending and state deficits.
Today, the Member States are engaged in an effort to contain the soaring costs of healthcare and, whenever possible, reduce them.
Measures put in place so far in order to contain such costs vary from the introduction of compulsory contribution by citizens towards the costs of the healthcare they receive (?moderating ticket? in France and Italy) to a progressive reduction of the service offered under the universal public health scheme (introduction of the concept of elective care in the UK or the reduction of the range of pharmaceuticals reimbursed by the public health system in Belgium).
All these instruments however are little more than stopgap measures to delay a degradation of the healthcare finances which is a direct consequence of a number of variables that no national or regional government controls: explosion of medical knowledge with the continuous introduction of new - and often expensive - diagnostic procedures and disease treatments, ageing of the population ? every three years the average life expectancy of the European citizens increases by one year, and increasing conscience of the right to high quality healthcare among European citizens.
To reverse the stream, more far-reaching reforms of the healthcare delivery systems must be considered. These have to critically examine the delivery system as it is today  the result of over a century of organisational stratification and see what todays ICT can do to rationalise the delivery system in ways which were still unthinkable just a few years ago.
During the market validation phase, HEALTH OPTIMUM has market validated a comprehensive suite of telemedicine services able to improve the perceived quality of the healthcare services provided and, at the same time, to enable a reduction in the costs related to their production and delivery. The Project has also evaluated the users? acceptance of the services and validated a business model on which the HEALTH OPTIMUM Initial Market Deployment phase is based.