eHealth Tools for Patients and Professionals in a Multicultural World

In many countries today, an important challenge for health care is the fact that the population is mixed as regards cultural background and not the least with regard to preferred language. In our country Sweden almost 20% of the population has some connection to another country and many patients seeking health care do not have sufficient mastering of the dominant Swedish language to get optimal care. We propose in this study a set of eHealth services that could be implemented within a country and in multinational co-operation to deal with some of these issues in an effective way which both empowers the citizens, improves patient safety and at the same time may offer cost savings for the publicly financed health care systems in the countries of the European Union. The basic idea is to use a set of people-people communication strategies using ICT tools combined with semantic tools for information sharing and conversion. This requires new and challenging organizational contexts.