Health Consumer Powerhouse Euro Health Consumer Index 2013 report
which was a remarkable improvement. In 2013, only in 12 countries do patient organisations seem to remember this; a side effect of economic cutbacks? Still, there is a lot to improve: if the patient has to fill in a two-page form and pay EUR 15 to get access to her own medical record, it sounds more like a bad joke than a 21st century approach to patients’ rights (this is an actual example). In e-Health, some CEE countries (most notably the FYR Macedonia) have introduced applications, which are still rare in Western Europe. This is probably similar to the rapid uptake of mobile telephones in India – sometimes, it can be an advantage not to have had an ancient technology established.
6.3 Healthcare Quality Measured as Outcomes For a detailed view of the results indicators, please see section 9.10.3 in order to study development over time. Generally it is important to note that regardless of financial crises and austerity measures, treatment results in European healthcare keep improving. Perhaps the best single indicator on healthcare quality, 3.2 Infant deaths, where the cut-offs between Red/Amber/Green scores have been kept constant since 2006, shows an increase in the number of Green scores from 9 in 2006 to 22 in 2013, (plus Scotland). The figure below shows the “healthcare quality map” of Europe based on the Outcomes sub-discipline scores in EHCI 2013:
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