What is eHealth?
eHealth is the electronic management of an individual’s health information, which has been designed to improve upon some of the existing paper based systems. eHealth has been designed to increase efficiency within healthcare, and in turn this will help to decrease costs.
How eHealth Works
eHealth works by providing individual’s access to their medical records in an easy and convenient manner. This is done by allowing access to individual’s online. This can be extremely beneficial because it allows individuals the opportunity to see exactly what being kept within their medical records, and eHealth is available in a number of forms.
Electronic Health Records is a computerised method of storing an individual’s medical records, so that they can be passed between different medical professionals with ease. This is particularly beneficial because it could reduce the time in which it takes for professionals to diagnose a serious condition. It is a system that is also capable of being shared across different care settings. For example if an elderly individual who was living in a care home were to become ill their medical records can be passed between the nursing home in which they live and any medical professionals that deal with their case.
Telmedicine is where telecommunication and other computerised methods are used in order to provide an individual with health care at a distance. This can be extremely beneficial, particularly to those who live in rural areas. This is because it allows people who live to far away to receive health care without inconvenience.
Consumer Health Informatics is designed to help to bridge the gap between individuals and health resources. This allows individuals to remotely communicate with health professional. This again would be extremely beneficial for those who live in rural areas. This means that they will receive a much more effective and efficient service, without having to deal with any stress from having to travel long distances to receive care.
Could eHealth be beneficial to you?
eHealth can be extremely beneficial for individuals because it can be a more efficient manner of dealing with healthcare services. The time taken for health processes to be completed can be greatly reduced. An example of this would be the time that health professional needs to spend on data handling tasks is lessened, and this benefits individual’s because it means that doctors will have more time to spend dealing with the individual and finding ways of resolving problems.
Another benefit that eHealth would be cost. Using computerised methods for healthcare can greatly reduce the costs. This is largely because it can reduce the needs for travel, as consultations can be done online. It can also reduces the need for referring individual’s to specialists
Another benefit that eHealth can have for an individual is it can have a slightly less formal approach in terms of consultations in comparison to going into hospital or a doctors surgery and having a consultation face-to-face. This may be beneficial for some people because they may find visiting doctors in person too stressful. It also creates a similar atmosphere to house calls which can make the situation a bit more comfortable.
Disadvantages to eHealth
However there are a few disadvantages to eHealth. The main disadvantage of the eHealth system would be trust. This is because it will become increasingly difficult for both doctors and individuals to know if they can trust each other. For example individual’s may simply fake symptoms in order to get prescriptions, as it may be difficult to make accurate diagnoses. Alternatively individual’s may find it difficult to trust their doctors diagnoses because they may feel that it is impossible to diagnose an illness or ailment over the internet.
Another disadvantage of eHealth is individuals may be worried about their records being stolen. Even though the possibility of records being stolen is extremely low, there is still a minor possibility and this can be extremely worrying for some individuals.
Over time eHealth will be become common practice because health systems are under strain from the increasing number of elderly people and the increases in people with long term conditions. There will not be enough time for doctors to meet all the patients face-to-face because the doctor will need to more efficient in working on diagnosis.