EU Member State data on cross-border healthcare

The European Commission has published data from 23 EU Member States on their use of the Cross-border Healthcare Directive (legal basis for the establishment  of ERNs). The European Health Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis emphasised the importance of this legislation for patients’ rights and regretted the low awareness among EU citizens of patients’ rights to cross-border healthcare. The Commissioner highlighted the European Reference Networks (ERNs), as an excellent example of how cooperation between health systems can help patients suffering from a rare and complex disease by offering healthcare providers better access to key knowledge and expertise: “Some medical conditions arise too infrequently for all countries to invest in the expertise to diagnose and treat them. ERNs – the first of which are expected to become operational in 2017 – can overcome this problem by pooling expertise from across different EU countries”.