Personal health systems - need, market place and challenges to their wide scale adoption

In this paper, the needs, marketplace and the challenges of wide scale adoption of personal health systems are addressed.Personal Health Systems (PHS) are believed to empower citizens to become involved in healthcare processes, encourage preventive lifestyle, enable early diagnosis of diseases, facilitate the provision of personalized care at the point of need, and as such offer effective means to contain the rising healthcare costs. However, full market exploitation and large-scale utilization of PHS requires development of new service/care provisioning practices and related business models, acceptance and support from national authorities and payers (such as insurance companies), and proof for the cost-effectiveness of the methodology. In other words, there´s more to Personal Health Systems than technologies and traditional R&D.