Abstract
Globally, the tremendous growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has led to a great expansion of the information produced, emerging new terms such as E-government (EG), Digital Governance (DG), and Digital Transformation (DT) that brought revolutionary changes in public administration and other sectors such as telecommunication, industry, and energy but not enough in public healthcare area. This study set out to explore the level of development of DT of Greek Public Healthcare (GPH) since 2000, focusing on the e-Health and Digital Health (DH) applications and services, and highlighting its accelerated development due to COVID-19 pandemic and its main problems in its application. A review of comparative studies published from 2000 to date was conducted. Search was demonstrated on Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), European Commission and Open Data Institute (ODI) databases, and Greek Legislation Framework. Keywords we used: «Digital Transformation», “Digital Governance”, “e-Health”, “Digital Health”, “Electronic Health Record”, “e-prescription”, “Health Information Systems”, “Health Atlas”, “m- Health/Mobile Health”, “Telemedicine”, “Telehealth”, “ICT Action Plan”. During the first decade, there were many advances in DG and DT, like the Integrated Health Information Systems (IHIS), which in the majority of their implementation have not adequately fulfilled their role remaining as isolated HIS. The second decade, marked by the memorandum and the economic crisis, brought many significant changes in the context of the organization and rational administration of the GPH, especially in the field of DT, DG, and e-Health such as e-prescription, ESY.net, e-inventories, e- warehouses, e- invoicing of hospital charges, electronic Statements of Detailed Health Documents (eDAPY), the United4Health project, the National Telemedicine Network and the partially developed Individual Electronic Health Record (IEHR). Taken together, these results suggest that, Greece still lags in the field of e- Health and significant steps are needed to make GPH cost-effective, accessible, and inclusive, such as among others the integration of IEHR and the import of Laboratory Information System (LIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACs) data into the IEHR.
