E-Health and Collaborative Patient Care



E-Health and Collaborative Patient Care

Introduction

The role of IT-technology increases rapidly in medicine, and basic skills of the use of computers and networks must be a part of all future medical curricula. In some areas of practicing medicine over a distance is nothing new. Radiologists and pathologists are used to give expert opinions of x-ray pictures or biopsies telemetrically, while specific skills may be required in other fields. The impact of technical equipments between the patient and the doctor must be understood, and the situation where the diagnosis is based on lives voice or picture indifferent from a normal doctor-patient contact.

In some areas telemedicine requires unique techniques. Teleological operations differ from what surgeons normally learn. Disciplines dedicated to the use of telemetrically techniques probably emerge. Telemedicine is best suited for doctor-to-doctor consultations, and the first contact to a doctor should always be a face-to-face consultation. IT offers however many possibilities to patients as well. Patients seek already much health information from the net, and in the future, more health services will be available. As applications appear, people should know more about e-health. It should be considered what schools could do to increase e-health literacy. The paper discusses principals, applications and challenged of eHealth systems in the collaborative patient care context.

Discussion

Fueled by advances in information and communication technologies, government and non-profit organizations in the USA are taking steps to help close gaps in access to healthcare information and communication. Healthcare systems in industrialized countries, and increasingly those in countries in transition, are faced with the challenge of ensuring efficient and high quality care. This challenge must be realized despite demographic developments, the growth of multimorbidity, demands health services and expenditures for diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, and decreasing contributions to health insurance funds. To meet this challenge independently of time, location and local resources, utilizing advanced knowledge and technologies, the systems have been changing from an organization entered towards a process-controlled care paradigm, which is also called shared care, managed care or disease management.

This development is combined with extended cross-organizational communication and cooperation between all healthcares establishments directly or indirectly involved in patient's care. This process has to be supported by deploying advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) in health, connecting primary and secondary care. Regarding the need for prevention and the integration of social care in an aging society (addressing citizens before becoming patients, and so moving the focus from healthcare to health) this process controlled strategy is no longer sufficient. Health, nowadays provided by organizations such as hospitals, primary care offices, policlinics, or medical centers, has to move closer to the citizens' environment. Observing the citizens' health status, context and conditions for providing person centered (personalized) and dedicated health services imply the need for a new health paradigm: personal care, which completely integrates all principals involved in the care process. According to the definition of the Object Management Group (OMG), principals are any actors in the domain in question such as persons, organizations, systems, devices, applications, ...