E-health

e-Health (also written ehealth) is a relatively recent term for healthcare practice which is supported by electronic processes and communication. The term can encompass a range of services that are at the edge of medicine/healthcare and information technology:


 * Electronic Health Records: enable easy communication of patient data between different healthcare professionals (GPs, specialists, care team, pharmacy)
 * Telemedicine: includes all types of physical and psychological measurements that do not require a patient to travel to a specialist. When this service works, patients need to travel less to a specialist or conversely the specialist has a larger catchment area.
 * Consumer Health Informatics (or citizen-oriented information provision): both healthy individuals and patients want to be informed on medical topics.
 * Health knowledge management (or specialist-oriented information provision): e.g. in an overview of latest medical journals, best practice guidelines or epidemiological tracking.
 * Virtual healthcare teams: consist 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 uses eHealth Grids that provide 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. Whether these tasks are part of eHealth depends on the chosen definition, they do, however, interface with most eHealth implementations due to the complex relationship between administration and healthcare at health care providers.