Published with the full support of the NHS, The European Commission, The OECD and The Department For Innovation Universties and Skills the e-health briefing was inserted into, and first distributed by The Financial Times in July 2008. The Financial Times with its exceptional business coverage and focus continues to dominate the market for the delivery of c-level executives and business decision makers at the highest level and as such provided the perfect home for this insert.

As the drive for efficiency intensifies the health sector is being forced to modernise at a previously unprecedented rate. Organisations across the sector are transforming: advanced technology, infrastructures, systems and programmes are being put in place to ensure that safety, quality assurance and improvement are at the top of the agenda.

Demands on healthcare throughout the developed world are changing. The combination of the global demographic trend towards an ageing population coupled with a sedentary western lifestyle and poor diet is leading to higher probability and earlier onset of chronic disease (type two diabetes, chronic heart disease, cancers, renal failures and COPD). Factoring in the growing patient demands for personalised treatment, necessary contact, medicine and services, the result is huge cost pressures on healthcare.

Healthcare information systems in use today were mainly designed to manage acute illness, such as infections and injury, making them ill-equipped to cope with the growing requirement for pervasive monitoring of long-term conditions and serious disease coupled with the modern need for pervasive communications and contact structures. With healthcare budgets already overstretched and fewer carers – professional and non-professional – available to meet these increased needs, the forecasted additional demands are simply unsustainable using current practice.

Therefore this briefing explored how throughout many western national healthcare services advanced technology is now viewed as central to the future provision of safe, efficient, high quality, citizen-centred health care.

Other industries have captured the value of electronics early on,and the briefing discussed how UK and European healthcare systems present perhaps the greatest potential for electronic applications.

The briefing demonstrated how connectivity and communications solutions, can help streamline administrative workflows, reduce waste and inefficiencies, identify patients, and monitor patient progress and safety.

The report detailed how Healthcare Sevices are using technologies to improve patient care and safety, using technologies to fine-tune diagnoses, monitor progress, and maintain therapeutic contact through email. How practitioners are already using telephony and Internet as a virtual office to provide interactive consultations and how managed care is also making provisions for e-Health.

This briefing described how e-health can increase efficiency in health care, and decrease costs. By avoiding duplicative or unnecessary diagnostic or therapeutic interventions, through enhanced communication possibilities the briefing showed how e-health can bridge the gap between health care establishments, and patient involvement.

It also explained how e-health can improve the quality of care and increase efficiency involving not only reducing costs, but at the same time improving quality. E-health may enhance the quality of health care for example by allowing comparisons between different providers, involving consumers as additional power for quality assurance, and directing patient streams to the best quality providers.

The 72 page briefing shows how e-health Empowers consumers and patients - by making the knowledge bases of medicine and personal electronic records accessible to consumers over the Internet, e-health opens new avenues for patient-centred medicine, and enables evidence-based patient choice.