IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

What in the world is “meHealth”?

It’s the combination of mHealth and e-health technologies and services to give personalized health support to anyone in the health system, whether patients, nurses, doctors, community health workers, administrations, or anywhere in between. In the simplest terms, meHealth is about communicating information within a health care system to improve desirable health outcomes.

A WHO statement on the research, made available to PANA in Lagos, Nigeria, Friday, said scientists carrying out research in Zambia found that the turnaround times for delivering a diagnosis via SMS (Short Message Service) were almost twice as fast compared to traditional postal methods.

The study found that average time for a result notification from a testing lab to a health facility fell from 44.2 days to 26.7 days.

The WSA are held every two years in association with the United Nations. The WSA Grand Jury 07 meets in Croatia from today, August 31st until September 7th. A total of 36 experts from all parts of the world will come together to judge the best contents and most innovative applications from around the world, including ‘Ratemyhospital.ie’.

Countries around the world are turning towards eHealth to enhance healthcare service delivery and Pakistan should do likewise, said speakers on the closing day of the International Conference on eHealth at the University of Health Sciences on Sunday.

Developing countries like Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Rwanda have taken steps towards revolutionising their health sector through the use of eHealth, which refers to the use of information and communication technology in the provision of healthcare services.

The aim is to generate data for European healthcare systems so that telemedicine can be adopted as part of regular care for chronically ill patients. Renewing Health is a highly ambitious clinical trial that will involve close to 8 000 patients in the intervention groups with cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or diabetes from the nine participating regions.

Telemedicine is a combination of medical and telecommunication equipment that allows doctors to examine patients hundreds of kilometres away, usually with the assistance of a trained nurse at the patient’s end.

The Maldives’ first telemedicine facility was donated by Dhiraagu in late December 2010, and installed on Thinadhoo in Gaaf Dhaal at a cost of Rf 2 million (US$155,000).

With the rapid growth of electronic media, medical professionals can provide an increasing range of healthcare information and services at a distance. Telemedicine, as this emerging phenomenon is called, was the focus of a seminar held on February 6th and 7th in Skopje.

The event, organised by the International Virtual e-Hospital Foundation (IVeH) in co-operation with Macedonia's health ministry, brought experts in the field together to discuss current technologies and applications.

European Member States have adopted the “European Co-operation on eHealth” declaration in a closed ministerial meeting held at eHealth Week 2010 in Barcelona, Spain.

According to the declaration, ICT for Health (eHealth) is a tool designed to “improve quality and patient safety, to modernise national healthcare systems, to increase their efficiency and to make them better adapted to the individual needs of citizens and health professionals.”

South Korean technology company LG CNS has been named preferred bidder to provide the digital systems for a pilot “smart city” in South Korea that among other things will monitor the health of residents.

The pilot is a precursor for the $4.2bn smart city planned on a 280ha greenfield site west of the city of Busan, called Busan Eco Delta Smart City.

This past July, an important development in healthcare IT was made with the launch of the European patient Smart Open Services (epSOS) ‘large scale pilot’ on interoperability of national e-health systems, involving 12 EU countries and scheduled to run for three years.

It leaves 17 per cent without any service offerings.

Kathy Calvin, CEO of the UN Foundation, which along with the Vodafone Foundation are partners in the report, said: “Wireless technologies have enormous potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health programs as they grow beyond the pilot programs common in most of the world. This report provides the data that can help accelerate the strategic use and evaluation of mobile technologies as mHealth is taken to scale to help meet health needs.”

The report is a follow up to the ’EU Citizens’ Rights – The way forward’ consultation, launched in June 2010. The consultation aimed to indentify how the rights stemming from Union Citizenship could be strengthened. The report focuses on people who live in a different EU country and examines how they can make full use of their rights, as they are able to do in their home country. It points out existing gaps in the legal framework and highlights the challenges that citizens living abroad face in their daily lives. Reinforcing EU citizenship and allowing citizens to make full use of their rights is a priority of President Barroso, included in his political guidelines.

The e-health system would cover all the Australia’s health systems in which patient all health records would get merge and a single record would be maintained. The system took two years to be established at the cost of $466.7 million. The system would give patients freedom to maintain their records, access them whenever they want. Doctors would also be able to take more firm decisions due to access to all health summaries, medical data and this would also ensure less medical errors.

"Ultimately, people need to make their telemedicine programs sustainable," explained Nirav Desai, founder and CEO of Hands on Telehealth and author of The 10 Secrets Of Telehealth Success. "Programs that run out of funds don't have a leg to stand on. It's important to figure out the ROI that can be made and the capital that can be gained from the very beginning."

Although the concept of telehealth has existed for decades, it’s been relatively slow to catch on. Getting patients to feel comfortable with the idea of online care—and finding medical professionals who felt confident about conducting their work in a remote setting—has not been easy. Even with willing participants and infrastructure in place, bureaucratic red tape meant providers faced an uphill battle when it came to legally treating patients and being reimbursed for their virtual care.

As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. Social distancing and shelter-in-place practices due to COVID-19 have forced non-urgent healthcare providers to close their doors and pushed many patients to seek care remotely. In response, and for the first time, the federal government has empowered doctors to use telehealth to treat Medicare patients. Many state governments and private insurers have followed suit; in fact, several of the nation’s largest insurance companies have waived copays to encourage telehealth visits. COVID-19has illuminated three key lessons that paint a positive picture of the future of telehealth.

PricewaterhouseCoopers presented the findings of the survey at the mHealth Initiative 2nd International mHealth Conference. The new report, titled “Healthcare Unwired,” looks into the changing nature of healthcare with wireless technology, remote monitoring and mobile devices.

While wireless enablement creates a number of important advantages for providers and patients no matter where they live, the focus on how telemedicine benefits communities is often different in Third World countries than it is industrialized countries, like the United States.

"A bad end-user experience is when things go slowly or are unstable. That makes telemedicine difficult to adopt. That's what we don't want," said Arthur Lane, associate director of healthcare strategy and new market development at Verizon Wireless. "We need these solutions to work. We need something to help fight the escalation of cost, improve consumer and clinician satisfaction, enhance overall interactions, and help supply care to a growing and aging populace. How can we make this available to everyone? Reliable and secure high-speed connections."