Healthcare information technology in Italy,critiques and suggestions for European digitalization

The e-Health has been introduced in the last twenty years as a new paradigm of healthcare organization: it allows the use of new technological devices to manage health data in a rational way, with the dual aim to make service provision more efficient and to reduce public expenditure in healthcare. According to the italian Constitution, digital healthcare answers to the institutional aim of health protection, by giving concrete solutions for the equal satisfaction of this fundamental right through the new digital tools adopted by the national healthcare system: electronic healthcare record, telemedicine and e-prescription are some of the most important ones. Although the European Union has encouraged the realization of projects, initiatives and regulations to create a proper common space for digital healthcare, actually e-Health has gradually been formally recognized also in the Italian national law, but regional contributions, entitled to implement the same regulation, allowed only a qualitatively uneven development of e-health services. The national healthcare system must necessarily take the changes occurred in today's national social scene into consideration, in order to change itself and answer the new needs emerged, and must face to this lack of application uniformity of digital services.