electronichealth

=Electronic Health=

"eHealth is the single-most important revolution in healthcare since the advent of modern medicine, vaccines, or even public health measures like sanitation and clean water".

The term E-Health has been around since just before the beginning of the 21st century. It is a term to denote the delivery of clinical information, care and services. The term encompasses a huge area of Health Informatics and the terms can be used almost interchangeably. There is no exact definition of E-Health because it encompasses but at the same time everyone has their own idea of what the term means. The World Health Organisation defines it as "eHealth is the cost-effective and secure use of information and communications technologies in support of health and health-related fields, including health-care services, health surveillance, health literature, and health education, knowledge and research". The EC defines E-Health as, The EC defines e-Health as, "the use of modern information and communication technologies to meet needs of citizens, patients, healthcare professionals, healthcare providers, as well as policy makers".
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 * Pros:**
 * 1) Decisions about patient care can be made faster by streamlining the processes that support healthcare. It can also improve the effectiveness of the medical care the patient receives.
 * 2) It adds the additional benefit of holding Doctors and hospitals accountable for their actions. If they order a treatment, you know who, what, where, when and why it happened.
 * 3) It allows doctors to keep up with the most up to date treatments and medicines.
 * 4) It allows doctors to collaborate and discuss specific patients, reducing the chance of errors they would make otherwise.
 * 5) Doctors can make more accurate diagnoses.
 * 6) It allows for doctors to not be limited to physical or mental blocks such as language or location. For example, if an EMR system could be installed globally, a person could get their medical records sent anywhere in the world so any doctor could read them and find out your past medical history.
 * 7) Patients have the power to make better health-care decisions for themselves.


 * CONS**
 * There is not much long-term evidence that supports the cost effectiveness of E-health.
 * When E-health software is developed, it will need to address many hard-to-solve issues. It will need to address human and organizational factors from both the perspectives of the health-care staff (doctors and nurses) and normal people (patients).
 * Nothing is standardized. Every doctor's office and hospital on E-Health systems are all different. In the world today, there are more than 150 different systems in use. Although we are moving in that direction right now, it still remains a major issue for progressing.
 * The legal and ethical implications of using health imformation technologies and clinical decision support systems which may result in harmful effects in certain cases are not yet clear. System developers need to employ quality and safety assurance methods to avoid clinical risks and legal liability.
 * We have not studied the effects of implementing E-health systems on the populous to a large enough extent. There is no way to know how people will react to them.
 * People who don't know how to use a computer well or can't use one at all will be disadvantaged if E-health systems take over older systems. More computer training is needed.

=**Applications:**=


 * Electronic health records:** enabling the communication of patient data between different healthcare professionals.


 * Telemedicine:** Using machines to treat medical issues remotely..


 * Consumer health informatics:** Public information that helps people identify that they have a problem and possible solutions to that problem. Examples include www.webmed.com and www.webmd.com


 * Health knowledge management:** This is what the doctors use to look up the latest medical journals and best practice treatments for the situation. Doctors can use their PDAs or their phones with internet access to get to this information.Their resources the data repositories such as Medscape and MDLinx.


 * Virtual healthcare teams:** This method of use is a more collaborative one. If you are under the care of many doctors, they all have different treatments and many ways to go about the problem. With a system such as this, meetings can be set up so every doctor can talk to another, share information, and decide together on improtant issues through the internet.


 * mHealth or m-Health:** includes the use of mobile devices in collecting aggregate and patient level health data, providing healthcare information to practitioners, researchers, and patients, real-time monitoring of patient vitals, and direct provision of care (via mobile telemedicine).


 * Databasing:** Being able to take a large amount of data from multiple healthcare sources and then storing it for use at a later date.


 * Data Mining**: Will allow us to see trends in the data and will allow us to predict what will happen next in the world of health-care.


 * Healthcare Information Systems:** Programs used to ease the administrative burden of the doctors. These systems will allow for better time management, scheduling, and data management.

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//**Related Terminology:**//

Health Informatics Health 2.0 Telemedicine Electronic health records Data mining database Healthcare Information Systems

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