What is e-health?

Abstract

Everybody talks about e-health these days, but few people have come up with clear definition of this comparatively term. Barely in use before 1999, this term now seems to serve as general buzzword, used to characterize not only medicine, but also virtually everything related to computers and medicine. The term was apparently first used by industry leaders and marketing people rather than academics. They created and used this term in line with other e-words such as e-commerce, e-business, e-solutions, and so on, in an attempt to convey the promises, principles, excitement (and hype) around e-commerce (electronic commerce) to the health arena, and to give an account of the possibilities the Internet is opening up to the area of health Intel, for example, referred to e-health as a concerted effort undertaken by leaders in health care and hi-tech industries to fully harness the benefits available through convergence of the Internet and health care. Because the Internet created opportunities and challenges to the traditional health care information technology industry, the use of term to address these issues seemed appropriate. These new challenges for the health care information technology industry were mainly (1) the capability of consumers to interact with their systems online (B2C = business to consumer); (2) improved possibilities for institutionto-institution transmissions of data (B2B = business to business); (3) possibilities for peerto-peer communication of consumers (C2C = consumer to consumer).

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