The Economic Potential of Existing eHealth Systems in the Czech Republic

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the contemporary area of information technologies employed in health care (eHealth). Focusing on the systems already employed in the Czech Republic, it aims to analyse them, to quantify expenditures of their introduction and maximum benefits derived from these, as well as to evaluate their real current profit. Out of the three existing national systems, this dissertation concentrates on the two only (eRecept, ePACS), as it became impossible to evaluate the third -- IZIP system due to scarcity of the relevant information available. In the field of expenditures not only generally published numbers are taken into consideration, but this dissertation also evaluates the expenditures of other subjects involved (IT systems producers, health care providers, etc.). As the first dissertation in the Czech Republic it quantifies benefits derived from the existing eHealth systems and unlike foreign theses it greatly emphasizes just the expenditures of other subjects involved. Included in this dissertation is also the evaluation of achievements of the eHealth systems in the Czech Republic complete with supposed grounds for this situation. This dissertation also recommends courses of action for contractors of these systems to ensure future basis for more economical and successful eHealth systems. These recommendations are mainly based on analysis of development of the existing national eHealth systems. For the complex evaluation of the costs, maximum of possible and real benefit of the individual eHealth systems the research approach adopted in this dissertation includes descriptive method and SWOT analysis, extrapolation and abstraction, comparative and factor analysis.