What is eHealth?
eHealth is the collective term for the use of digital technology and communication tools to support, improve, or increase the accessibility of healthcare. It does not refer to one specific application, but to a wide range of digital tools that connect healthcare providers and patients with each other and with health data, from simple communication apps to complex systems for remote monitoring.
eHealth is often mentioned in the same breath as terms like telehealth and home automation, but it is broader: telehealth (remote care) is a form of eHealth, just like digital patient records and decision-support software. What all these applications have in common is that personal health data is collected, processed, or shared, often outside the walls of the healthcare institution itself.
eHealth in practice: examples
eHealth applications come in many forms. Some common examples in Dutch healthcare:
• Telemonitoring: remotely tracking vital signs such as heart rate, blood pressure, or glucose levels, for example in patients with chronic conditions.
• Video consultations: a consultation with a GP, specialist, or mental health professional via a secure video connection instead of an in-person appointment.
• Patient portals: environments where patients can view their own records, test results, or appointments.
• Electronic health and client records (EHR/ECR): digital storage and access to medical data, often accessible by multiple healthcare providers simultaneously.
• Mobile health apps: for medication reminders, lifestyle coaching, or tracking symptoms.
• Wearables and sensors: devices that collect health data outside the healthcare institution, for example at home.
What connects these examples is that they all rely on an IT environment that must be continuously available, interoperable, and secure, often outside office hours, and frequently involving multiple parties sharing data with one another.
Why eHealth requires a scalable, secure cloud
The more healthcare is provided digitally, the greater the reliance on the underlying IT infrastructure. A failure in a patient portal or EHR is not just an IT problem; it can directly impact patient care. At the same time, the volume of data being collected and shared is growing, for example between a hospital, a home care organization, and a patient who is sending in their own measurements via an app.
Cloud infrastructure offers the scalability and availability that eHealth applications need, but it also brings responsibility: where is the data stored, who has access to it, and does the infrastructure meet the requirements specific to healthcare? The latter is exactly where the NEN 7510 standard comes into play.
What does this mean for patient data in the cloud?
When a healthcare institution hosts eHealth applications (partially) in the cloud, some responsibility for information security shifts to the cloud provider, but not the ultimate responsibility. Under the GDPR, the healthcare institution remains responsible for protecting patient data, even when that data is stored with an external party. This makes choosing a cloud partner that is NEN 7510 certified, and which formalizes this in a data processing agreement, an important step in your own compliance journey.
In concrete terms, this involves matters such as data encryption (both at rest and in transit), strict access control to systems containing patient data, and logging who accessed which data and when—the latter also being the subject of the supplementary NEN 7513 standard. Additionally, the physical location of the data plays a role: cloud infrastructure that runs entirely in Dutch data centers, under Dutch law, makes it easier for healthcare institutions to demonstrate that data remains under their control.
