Health services are knowledge intensive and technology dependant environments. While the rapid growth of knowledge and technology presents excellent potential for making healthcare better, more effective and efficient, at the same time it creates specific challenges for service continuity, organisation and management.

Europe's eHealth landscape is characterised by heterogeneous systems. In the past there was a clear focus on the IT-support of individual organisations such as hospitals and health insurance organisations. However, this perspective is rapidly changing as integrated care management with shared patient documentation becomes more and more important.

Hence establishing interoperable eHealth services is a common challenge for health systems in Europe and European national governments have already taken important steps towards a collaborative approach; the European Commission is supporting such collaboration initiatives.

The main goal of the CALLIOPE Network is to produce value for decisionmakers for national eHealth implementations. CALLIOPE comprises a dedicated forum where decision makers, implementers, professionals, patients and other stakeholders can share visions, experiences and good practices on how to establish interoperable eHealth services.

CALLIOPE is set up by the EU-funded Thematic Network "CALLIOPE - Creating a European coordination network for eHealth interoperability implementation" The project was launched on 1 June 2008 with a duration of 30 months.