Diane Whitehouse is a partner in The Castlegate Consultancy, a UK-based public services and eHealth policy and analysis partnership. Diane works actively in the research, policy, and deployment fields of eHealth. Until February 2007, Diane was a Scientific Officer focusing on eHealth in the 'ICT for Health' Unit of the European Commission's General Directorate on Information Society and Media. She is a social scientist whose work has focused on the distributed, social, organisational, and ethical aspects of ICT. She has 25 years' work experience in European policy that has covered eHealth, academic research/teaching, social action research, human and civic rights, and ICT use by persons with disabilities and by older adults. She has co-written and co-edited a wide range of books and articles. In August 2007, Diane's services to the international association, IFIP, were recognised with a silver core award.