Article of the Month!
The World Health Organizations recognizes the impact of ICT on health and the potential of eHealth in strengthening health systems. With the passage of the eHealth Resolution in May 2005, WHO further endorsed ICT for Health. The Resolution mandated the organization to lead global efforts in Health and to report regularly on the status of eHealth worldwide. 
Today, in Europe, we can see that more and more initiatives are launched at national, regional or local level to enable health professionals to access the medical and medication history of their patients at any time and any place. This access is however often limited by various barriers. European citizens have become more mobile; they travel and work abroad and when they need healthcare away from home it should be delivered based on knowledge of the past medical history. 
The past decade has been the witness of quite noticeable changes of health care by Health ICT. Nowadays, eHealth symbolises the modernisation of healthcare in support of quality of care, empowerment of patients, higher efficiency and also increased health professional job satisfaction. This has not happened by itself, rather a synergy of strategic plans, political commitments and technical developments was needed. 
Two European projects developing IT-based services for cross-border healthcare provision, TEN4Health and NetC@rds, have agreed on a common European web service specification supporting standardised messaging to link hospitals and other health care providers with health insurance organisations and with national healthcare IT infrastructure.