E-Health: A New Kind of Telemedicine

ABSTRACT

This paper examines e-health in detail. E-health is the use of distant communication technologies in the healthcare context and the use of advanced information and communication technologies (i.e., the Internet) that meet the needs of citizens, patients, healthcare practitioners and professionals. The goal of the authors is to show that e-health services have improved telemedicine to the point of substantially transforming its very meaning. As such, e-health expands and redefines the operational usage of telemedicine services. E-health, for instance, is much more oriented to the wide-range possibilities of service delivery (i.e., e-health offers Web services such as WebMD.com, which receives a very high number of visitors). Besides, legal and licensing matters are no longer issues in e-health, in the same way that health insurance is not an obstacle with e-health, which may also be the cure to the paucity of knowledge that telemedicine services used to provide. Nevertheless, e-health also presents major limitations, among which are the lack of real-time interaction between the patient and provider and the inaccessibility to e-health by a certain number of disadvantaged and isolated groups. Finally, this paper ends with a discussion section, in which an extensive summary and suggestions for future research are given.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication
• doctor
• e-health
• healthcare
• patient
• telemedicine