“eHealth is defined as the application of Information and Communication Technology within a large range of aspects that affects health care, from diagnosis to tracing patient care, using organization management specialized in these activities. eHealth provides citizens with significant advantages in information, even favoring the acquirement of alternative diagnosis. In general, for professionals, eHealth has lead to an improvement in the access to relevant information, associated with the most important medical magazines and associations, with assisted electronic prescriptions, and finally, global accessibility to medical data through informed clinical history”. This is how the Informe Anual sobre el Desarrollo de la Sociedad de la Información en España 2006 defined the term eHealth.
It’s a fact the Information and Communication Technology (TIC) is imposing more and more thanks to its unstoppable development. TIC has arrived in practically all fields, including health. eHealthsupposes an advance in health care and in the exchange of information between health professionals. The Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) divides eHealth in three main areas:
- Health information delivery through telecommunications.
- The use of information technology to improve the service and training in public health.
- The use of electronic business in health management.
The term eHealth has been in use since 2000 and prioritizes the exchange of information and bettering health care. According to the Annual Report about Development of Society in Spain 2006, “from 2002 the evolution of health resources online has been studied by the Health On The Net Foundation organization”; and although posterior reports have seen a clear progressive tendency towards the application of eHealth, there are still some unanswered questions about the success of the system. Julio Mayol, innovator in the health sector, declared in an interview for the Centro de Innovación BBVA en diciembre de 2012 that “I used to be a doctor who regulates the access to this kind of information, but technology has taken that power away from me and given it to the patients”.
However it looks like the favorite area of eSalud, for professionals and patients, is information exchange. The creation of specific web portals that simplify the access to information, catalogued as: personal health portals, patient-consumer portals, hospital-health service providers and electronic health trade portal. New technology is also being applied for the following of patients with chronic illnesses, improving the quality of assisted care.
eHealth has been consolidating a little bit at a time. Julio Lorca and Alejandro Jadad, director of RevistaeSalud.com and eHealth expert considers that eHealth “isn’t an alternative or addition to health care as a consequence of Communication and Information Technology (TIC), but a different way of offering health care in many cases, more efficiently and effectively, and in others, more equitably, thanks to the potential change they offer, in the aspects they improve: accessibility, the speed in which patients are attended, quicker diagnosis, money saving, alerts implantation, better service etc. Only in special cases, where there is a noticeable amount of value added, we would talk about a new assistance modal.
