Health Determinants and Unmet Needs for Health Care- towards e-Health Systems

The traditional public health care system should move forward towards prevention by building a strong brand strategy. Taking into consideration the health care expenditure, the paper focuses on the analysis of heath determinants: body mass index, physical activity, consumption of fruits and vegetables, tobacco consumption, alcohol consumption, social environment in connection to the unmet needs for health care: financial reasons, distance or transportation, waiting list. In the context of the competition coming from private health care institutions, the branding strategy of the public health care system should increase customer satisfaction and trust in order to obtain customer affective commitment and awareness. The approach focuses on factor analysis used to validate the following hypothesis: H1. The main heath determinants are: body mass index, physical activity, consumption of fruits and vegetables, tobacco consumption, alcohol consumption, social environment; H2. The main reasons for self-reported unmet needs for health care are: financial reasons, distance or transportation, waiting list. Due to the rapid development of information technology, public health care systems should integrate these technological advances in their structure, with emphasize on brand strategy. The paper has the following structure: after the Introduction, the Literature review part covers issues connected to brand experience, health determinants, health care needs within the EU-28 member states. Section 3 underlines the research methodology, using factor analysis as main method of macroeconomic data interpretation. The next section includes the results of the research, while the Conclusions part focuses on the main ideas of this research, together with the limits of the current approach. However, the research has some limits caused by the availability of up to date statistics and longer time series for the analyzed variables. We intend to further develop our research by introducing in the analysis other health care related variables within the European Union member states and other countries.