EHealth - Forms of E-health

Forms of E-health

The term can encompass a range of services or systems that are at the edge of medicine/healthcare and information technology, including:

• Electronic health records: enabling the communication of patient data between different healthcare professionals (GPs, specialists etc.);
• Telemedicine: physical and psychological treatments at a distance;
• Consumer health informatics: use of electronic resources on medical topics by healthy individuals or patients;
• Health knowledge management: e.g. in an overview of latest medical journals, best practice guidelines or epidemiological tracking (examples include physician resources such as Medscape and MDLinx);
• Virtual healthcare teams: consisting of healthcare professionals who collaborate and share information on patients through digital equipment (for transmural care);
• 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);
• Medical research using Grids: powerful computing and data management capabilities to handle large amounts of heterogeneous data.
• Healthcare Information Systems: also often refer to software solutions for appointment scheduling, patient data management, work schedule management and other administrative tasks surrounding health.