Introduction to Part IV

Abstract

As human beings, we often like to ponder theory in a void. However, there is nothing more challenging that considering ethics in practice. This conference did not veer away from that challenge. Here the stimulus has been to choose two of the most important issues underlying today's Information Society eHealth and eLeaming firstly, in whatever healthcare context that provision takes place and, secondly, whether that education occurs in the school, university, or pre-occupational context. These are the very precise 'applied issues' to which this chapter is directed. eHealth is one of the mainstays of the Information Society. Since the 1960s initially, but particularly in the last decade and a half, eHealth has emerged from the domain of research and development into concrete deployment. Institutions and countries have dedicated more than a thousand million euros over more than a fifteen-year period to supporting research in this field (Olsson, Lymberis, and Whitehouse, 2004). The eighteen-step eHealth action plan published in a Communication of 2004, is now more than halfway complete (European Commission, 2004). The vast majority of the current Member States (European Commission, in press) now have eHealth strategies and actions. The Member States themselves are today exploring how to bring together their so far rather fragmented initiatives, challenged as they are by numerous provocations to provide good, accessible, high-quality, but also cost-effective eHealth (see eHealth conference 2007). In a climate in which the provision of healthcare especially cross-border throughout Europe is being raised, this enhanced, sophisticated provision of systems and services begins to pose a set of questions that pertain to the legal and regulatory context surrounding eHealth. Efforts are currently underway to ascertain precisely what the key issues are at a minimum, they cover data protection, product and service liability, and trade and competition (Herveg et al, in press). A particularly innovative approach can be to outline these provocative questions in the form of a series of case-studies or scenarios this is the basis of the Legally eHealth study. Here, however, Herveg and Poullet follow a more conventional and lawyerly