European Hospital Survey: Benchmarking deployment of e-Health services (20122013) Composite Indicators on eHealth Deployment and on Availability and Use of eHealth functionalities

eHealth has been on the European Commission Information Society's policy agenda for more than a decade, from the eEurope initiative(European Commission 1999) to the i2010 Strategy(European Commission 2005), and most recently the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE)(European Commission 2010), eHealth was also one of the Lead Market Initiatives in 2007. Today it is the focus of one of the two first pilots under the EU2020 Strategy and its Innovation Union flagship initiative the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing. The key strategic orientations of the European Commission eHealth policy are defined in the eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020 where eHealth is referred to as "the application of information and communications technologies across the whole range of functions that affect the health sector and including products, systems and services that go beyond simply Internet-based applications"(European Commission 2004).