Innovating eHealth in the Netherlands.

Innovation is essential to improve accessibility, effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare delivery. eHealth promises these improvements provided that it complies to essential requirements with respect to quality and patient safety. eHealth must be implemented thoughtfully to yield full benefit to the patient. However, there exists no structured framework of essential requirements to guide development, implementation and usage. The scope of application of eHealth is wide and new technology is introduced continuously. So, the framework of essential requirements must evolve as well to support and encourage innovation. The author proposes a process for continuous verification and validation of eHealth throughout development, implementation and use and a method to continuously update the framework of essential requirements.