Norwegian Health Care Professionals' Attitudes towards eHealth

The Health Informatics community delivers suggestions on how to achieve better services, and better quality of care, from better use of patient data. These suggestions may be accepted and adopted as public health policies, as health and privacy legislation, and even as IT systems. Yet the acid test remains; alleged improvements also need to be accepted by the patients and by the health care professionals. Research on the patients' attitudes towards various eHealth scenarios indicates they are willing to accept broader use of their data. They even expect data to become more available, both to relevant health care professionals and to themselves. The survey results that are briefly presented in this paper show that many health care professionals are skeptical to some aspects of eHealth. This survey is discussed against other research results. In particular, comparing this survey on health care professionals' attitudes to a survey on patients' attitudes, carried out by Statistics Sweden in 2005, reveals interesting differences between the patients and the health care professionals