eHealth: from space medicine to civil healthcare

Over the last decades the ultimate goal becomes delivering best possible health service for anyone, at any time, from anywhere. No doubt, the most effective way is by transferring the experience of space medicine and applying the major advances in information and communications technology (ICT) in civil healthcare. The aim of this paper is to establish the scope of eHealth based on an overview and comparison of nowadays status of eHealth in numerous countries, both developed and developing. The challenges, barriers and structure of the present eHealth world, i.e. industries supplying telemedicine arid eHealth products and solutions from one hand and the beneficiaries (healthcare systems and patients) from the other will be shortly presented. The paper will also stress on the big challenge at the present time, which is to make several different industries to coordinate their skills and efforts to achieve an optimal development within the health environment using modern communication systems as well as on the role of some international initiatives that have been established recently.