Estonian eHealth Foundation
Estonian eHealth Foundation was established in November 2005 by the Ministry of Social Affairs in cooperation with health care providers and professional medical societies. The strategic directions of the Foundation are determined by the Foundation’s supervisory board that includes the representatives of the founders.

Mission & Vision
Estonian eHealth Foundation has been founded in order to implement modern technologies in health care to give the state a better overview of the processes within the health care system as well as to make it possible for the doctors to increase the quality of care by being able to better manage patient information. The Foundation solves common problems of health care system (integration, standardization), and by doing so proportionally decreases the total health care system’s costs related to IT and the organizing the cooperation between health care institutions. Estonian eHealth Foundation does the following in order to achieve the goals established for the health care system:

• Develops and manages national e-health projects such as Electronic Health Record (EHR), Digital Registration, Digital Image and other e-health services.
• Develops and manages standards and classifiers of the health care field.
• Coordinates the development, actualization and publishing of national medical treatment guidelines.
• Publicly implements and publishes all obligatory health field standards, classifiers, treatment guidelines, and other centrally managed documents necessary for the proper functioning of information systems.
• Works in cooperation with other health care service providers, professional associations and other institutions active in the health care field.
• Develops and coordinates the harmonisation of the information systems of Estonia’s health care services providers.
• Develops and manages national health registers as well as other registers as needed.
• Creates the necessary material-technical base and infrastructure ensuring their development and proper functioning in order to carry out the Foundation’s activities and to achieve the established goals.
• Fulfils other responsibilities that have been administered to the Foundation by law or that are necessary for achieving the established goals of the Foundation.

The responsibility of the Foundation is to execute the projects as well as to ensure their interoperability, sustainability and continued management.  In addition to the projects indicated above the Foundation will be involved in other IT-related integration projects of health care system, and preparation and execution of respective tenders. The Foundation will solve problems associated with the later management phases of these respective projects according to need.
During the period of 2005-2008 there is a plan to implement the register of medical death causes, digital register notifications, the central component of the EstRai geriatric software, school health care portal, operational digital notifications of infectious diseases, and to centralize vaccination information.

Other projects will be added considering the needs of the health care system, and these projects will be managed separately based on a specific project (project staff will be employed, and financial resources will be applied for since the expense budget in this current document only includes work that needs to be completed known as of today).