ERINA Dissemination Report - Recommendations for Exploiting Research Infrastructure potential in key Areas (e-Health, e-Government, e-Learning)

In recent years ICT for Healthcare, Government and Education improved significantly thanks to more than one hundred research initiatives under several frameworks, including the 6th Framework Program at EU level. Even if several success stories met their particular objectives, they resulted in a plurality of approaches without a clear coordination, neither at national nor European level. The consequent lack of interoperability of proposed solutions does not allow reuse, hence, economies of scale and the creation of a critical mass for wider adoption of best approaches. Within each domain, the European Commission is working to foster cooperation by developing Action Plans (e.g. the European e-Health and e-Government Action Plan) and roadmaps. However, despite the fact that all three domains heavily depend on public funding, no attempt has been so far identified to have a coordinated approach among the three domains, neither at national nor at European level. In the past, EU research (taken as a whole) experienced similar issues on a plurality of approaches and hence suffered in competing with other world economies. Nowadays, thanks to a Pan-European effort in establishing a top-class state-of-the-art research infrastructure, EU Research has renewed its worldwide leadership in most research domains. The pivotal element was the establishment of a common federated approach to Research e-Infrastructures, which were instrumental to organisational changes in the way research is done: the e-Science. The ERINA study is the first initiative aiming at identifying exploitation opportunities of Research e-Infrastructures as the ICT backbone of the three domains (Healthcare, Government, and Education). The approach followed was to look into a number of case studies and analyse them in terms of the potential use of e-Infrastructures in the three domains. This report describes several opportunities and identifies barriers which may hinder their adoption. The study concluded by putting forward recommendations on possible actions to exploit these opportunities beyond e-Science, at a European level, bridging the public founded results and experiences from Research e-Infrastructures with the need for innovation and “better public services” in other domains, where public founding is also relevant.