About e-Health Innovations

At its core e-Health technology allows the health system to reconfigure how it collects and analyzes data to improve how all areas of the system interact. This will improve patient satisfaction and quality of care.

Moving beyond basic electronic medical record databases, advanced e-Health innovations feature integrated and sophisticated technology that enables interconnectivity at all levels of the health system. 

Objectives

Patient empowerment

e-Health empowers patients and encourages self-management through applications (apps) that seek active patient participation. Active patient input will ultimately improve their quality of care and the ability to handle health issues.

These tools include:

• medication or appointment scheduling devices
• online communication portals that connect patients with communities, experts and resources related to their illness

Advanced decision support for health care providers

The collection of patient data is a valuable resource for health care professionals. Besides allowing for consolidated information stores, patient data can be analyzed to determine individual health trajectories or even calculate disease risk.

e-Health decision-making mechanisms are also ripe for fluid systems that integrate patient information, practice guidelines and facility resources to generate individualized, real-time treatment options.

Population health monitoring

Localized care delivery makes all the difference in how well we manage the health of Canadians. Whether at the community, provincial/territorial or national level, electronic health data from pharmacies, labs and other health centres can rapidly paint an accurate picture of current or emerging public health issues.

This advanced knowledge will enable the health system to effectively and efficiently respond to the needs of a given population. Real-time online searches and social media interaction can be used to generate heat-maps of health key words.

Outcomes

e-Health can cover a variety of services or systems that are at the edge of medicine/healthcare and information technology:

• Electronic health records enable the communication of patient data between different healthcare professionals.
• Telemedicine provides physical and psychological treatments at a distance.
• Consumer health informatics is the use of electronic resources on medical topics by healthy individuals or patients.
• Health knowledge management, for example, 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
• m-Health: the use of mobile devices to:
  • collect aggregate and patient-level health data
  • provide healthcare information to practitioners, researchers, and patients
  • monitor patient vitals, and direct provision of care (via mobile telemedicine) in real-time
• Medical research using grids are powerful computing and data management capabilities to handle large amounts of heterogeneous data.
• Healthcare information systems often refer to software solutions for:
  • appointment scheduling
  • patient data management
  • work schedule management and other administrative tasks surrounding health

Resources

• Canada Health Infoway
• COACH – Canada’s Health Informatics Assocation
• ITAC – Information Technology Association of Canada
• MEDEC
• World Health Organization - eHealth