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Abstract: In this millennium, public health systems have gradually been incorporating information and communication technologies (ICTs) into their administrative processes. Digitalized services and activities include identifying beneficiaries (health card); electronic records of the user's clinical history; electronic prescription and delivery of medication; creating a common, integrated repository of digital archives; creating information and analysis systems focused on the specific assistance needs of certain clinical services or patient groups; developing systems for interacting with patients; meta data analysis and/or exchange of clinical information at a national or European level.
The objective of this ongoing research is to analyze the development of e-health policies and to explore the progress that has been achieved, while also analyzing challenges and identifying vulnerable population groups at real or potential risk of being unattended with the emergence of new models for access and interaction.
Keywords: e-government; health care policies; access; digital exclusion; e-health
1. Introduction
Health services is one of the slowest economic activity sectors to incorporate information and communication technologies (ICTs). While other sectors had already begun to face this change in the last two decades of the twentieth century, the healthcare sector did not begin to consistently employ ICTs until well into the new millennium (Pagliari et al., 2005; Ahern, Kreslake & Phalen, 2006). Since then, healthcare provider organizations have slowly been incorporating the use of ICTs in a process that has received several names, but is most commonly known in academic and professional communities as e-health (Eysenbach, 2001).
This unequal, even chaotic process has involved a great deal of legal regulation and the multiple obstacles to standardization have generated significant failures (Boddy et al., 2009). Given the magnitude of some of these failed projects, we can assume healthcare to be one of the most complex service sectors for incorporating ICTs.
With such precedents in a sector that so clearly and directly impacts people's quality of life, social wellbeing and equality (Mair et Al., 2012), implementing e-health must attend to the risk of placing priority on meeting objectives rather than studying the collateral effects generated by this process.
These side effects may be particularly damaging if they aggravate exclusion for certain communities that have traditionally faced roadblocks in accessing quality health services, or if they create a new...