What is the make-up of ehealth systems?
Ehealth systems are made up of a few different areas that define the characteristics of healthcare online. In previous articles, I have touched on the process of diagnosis, the patient journey, as well as the doctor’s journey. Each struggling to achieve seamless collaboration for the best results quickly. Treatment is often influenced by timing. Getting a patient treatment at the right time is more likely to pull through and defeat the ailment or come to some kind of stability in their lives. Sometimes it can be minor changes that indicate the progression of a disease or injury. These can be difficult to pick up on without continued monitoring.? The diagnosis process has, up until now, always been in the hands of the doctors making the observations and the patients monitoring themselves at home. Ehealth is about improving monitoring and shortening the time to diagnosis, limiting the number of small changes that go unnoticed, and improving healthcare services to remote areas. For this article, we are going to talk about the make-up of ehealth systems.?
Key Points:
Ehealth platforms
Ehealth platforms have been popping up in many countries across the world with the purpose of reducing redundancy and increasing efficiency in healthcare. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines eHealth as “the cost-effective and secure use of information and communications technologies in support of health and health-related fields, including health-care services, health surveillance, health literature, and health education, knowledge and research.” While the European Commission sees three distinct pillars that will be the foundation of a prosperous digital age for the healthcare sector.
Companies like ETHEL are pursuing a collaborative effort for digital health services and care throughout Europe. They focus on these core elements much like other companies in the same space. The objective of these platforms is to allow for quality data sharing and encourage communication amongst specialists. This opens the floor up to cross-country collaboration on single cases. In turn, you will find that the time between the onset of symptoms and diagnosis is shortened.
There are a few key characteristics that make ehealth so appealing. The whole ehealth system is based on efficiency, evidence-based data, improving healthcare services, education, patient-doctor communication, and reducing costs. Ensuring a smooth flow from the onset of symptoms all the way to long-term management for the patient. Healthcare professionals are able to reduce the resources spent on each case while increasing the accuracy of diagnosis and treatment.?
Typical examples of different ehealth platforms already in use and improving lives include:
Each of these platforms is designed to tackle one or more of the main goals for ehealth. They reduce the struggle of obtaining accurate data and the management of the treatment thereafter.?
Pharma marketplaces
Online marketplaces have been a game-changer for many industries. Having an online marketplace gives customers the opportunity to compare goods and prices all on one website. Mitigating the need to go onto multiple websites and/or call multiple companies to get a comparison done. The pharma industry is equally submerged in the e-commerce world of pharmaceuticals. Providing medication and other types of treatment through an online pharmacy has assisted many people. Some people are less mobile, others do not want to spread their germs, and so the list goes on. It has truly made a difference in the lives of chronic medication users and remote communities. So let’s take a look at pharma marketplaces and what they have to offer you.?
There is a great deal of interesting online marketplaces focused on business-to-business in the pharmaceutical industry. You have companies selling ingredients for pharmaceuticals, partnership-focused websites, and collaboration on research and diagnosis across disciplines. It is an incredible system where innovation and streamlined processes join together. The impact on clinical trials has been particularly amazing. Using platforms that use machine learning AI provides the opportunity to perform clinical trials without the need to get people on board. Virtual human trials are far easier to complete in comparison to real-life trials and you reduce the risk for the patients participating significantly. And this is happening now, so it’s only a matter of time.?
On the other hand with business-to-customer platforms, you are able to witness a major change in product and service demand. Online pharmacies have become more prominent with e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Alibaba investing millions. This is partly due to the impact that COVID-19 has had on all medical services worldwide. The demand for digital prescriptions and virtual consultations has increased so dramatically that providers need to move quickly in order to catch the wave. After experiencing the harshest times of COVID-19, there was a surge in people wanting digital medical services. The less intrusive nature of telemedicine makes it ideal for many people. Medical professionals could use this as an opportunity to involve the patient more and perform monitoring without causing patient discomfort. In turn, the patient is able to fulfil prescriptions online and request a new prescription online instead of requiring a full in-person consultation.
The impact of COVID-19 on ehealth
Long before the most recent global pandemic occurred, there was a big push toward more digital services offered within healthcare. At first, it was simple, where patient information was stored digitally that eventually evolved into fully digital hospital systems. Later on, digital home devices were made for monitoring and data capturing. Now we find ourselves in an age where not only can the data be captured and stored, it can be analysed—limiting guesswork and finding those hard-to-notice incremental changes.
However, it was not as simple as changing to these new systems overnight. The digital age in medicine was moving quite slowly in comparison to other tech-focused industries. As amazing as it is for medical professionals to have digitally captured data it does carry risks. New systems may potentially disadvantage certain groups needing medical attention while also facing privacy laws and ensuring that information stored is not accessed unwillingly. The pace of the adoption of new services in healthcare has always been quite slow. That is until the global pandemic forced many people to stay indoors for extended periods of time.
It was not long after the pandemic took hold of the world that e-commerce saw a surge in requests. From food deliveries all the way to virtual classes, everything was being done online. There were way fewer people to do in-person purchases and even fewer bringing the produce and other goods to stores. This also meant that any non-COVID-19 related cases were taken into hospital unless absolutely necessary. Online pharmacies found themselves inundated with orders, forcing most companies to expand their offering and available stock.?
Digital services
As we have established, ehealth is all about connecting patients to professionals and connecting medical professions through collaboration. One of the most important branches of ehealth is the offering of digital services that include digital prescriptions, virtual consultations and apps assisting in monitoring and adhering to treatment programs.?
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Over the years these services have expanded in both the private and government sectors. In areas such as the EU, the services have grown into collaboration across the countries. Electronic cross-border health services, My Health @EU, is an ehealth digital services infrastructure. The purpose of this program is to ensure that EU citizens have access to chronic medication and healthcare while travelling through EU countries. The two main services being introduced are ePrescription and eDispensation as well as patient summaries. Through the ePrescription and eDispensation services, citizens will be able to fulfil their prescriptions in other EU countries as the offerings allow for the transfer of electronic prescriptions that can be accessed by pharmacies. Patient summaries are focused on patients from an EU country seeking medical attention or care in another EU country. It is the electronic health record of an individual patient that can be accessed by health professionals throughout the EU in their own language. The purpose is that there will be one record per patient within the EU and the doctor will be able to view important information in their native language. This way language barriers will become less of an issue for those who need specialised care.?
Soon enough more services will be rolled out and made accessible to the public. Each country and continent will likely have its own way of going about it but it will nonetheless become a standard part of the way we live.?
What to take away
I think the clear takeaway here is that we are moving more and more into a digital or electronic medical world. It may take years to fully bring all the systems and remote areas on board but it will likely become the norm. Ehealth is fast becoming the go-to medical care for many people. Eventually, we will find that ehealth will just be health services, it will be the norm.?
The efficiency and accuracy that ehealth services and platforms offer are far greater than we could have imagined. These small changes have had huge impacts on the lives of the chronically ill, those living in remote areas and people with rare diseases. The digitisation of medical care has also allowed doctors to gather data, monitor, and be present at the moment with confidence that they have accurate data. Making it much easier to make a judgement call for the treatment of the patient.?
However, we must take precautions when taking on digital services. As businesses and institutions, we need to ensure that all security measures are in place. It is personal information that is being shared between professionals which makes it vulnerable to cyber-attacks. It is also one of the reasons that implementation of digital services is slower in healthcare. Many variables influence which systems will be adopted.?
Though, with the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw that we can implement new systems faster than previously expected. So, who knows what exactly the future of ehealth is and what the makeup of ehealth will ultimately be when the conversion has been completed. What we do know is that it is coming and it may happen quicker than we may have thought.?
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Author Notes:?
My name is Damien and I am inquisitive, curious and many times stupefied, about all that tech has to offer the world. Most recently around the areas of AI, ML, and UX/CX? in e-Health and Digital Health Journeys. All of my views expressed here are those of my own and do not represent the views of the ZurRose Group. Follow me on a journey through e-Health and tech in the healthcare industry.
Sources:
B Wood Consulting
2 年You raise some good points. One of my main concerns is security management as many opportunists will see dollar signs with the roll out of these types of systems, especially because it will contai highly sensitive information that may make users particularly vulnerable.