Defined as being the set of digital services at the service of the person’s well-being, E-health encompasses the various applications aimed at preventing, diagnosing, or even treating diseases. Among these services, we find two major areas, the SIS (Health Information System) and SIH (Hospital Information System), which constitute the digital information base of E-health in hospitals and allow the organization of information flow, medical records, or even the management of vital cards internally in medical establishments.
A perfect example is the Physician Dispensing tool, which helps patients access medication easily. The Lab Information System (LIS) is another essential software. You can learn all the laboratory information system benefits to understand the primary uses of this software.
E-health also encompasses telemedicine, a medical practice that uses various telecommunication technologies to provide medical diagnoses or remote health care. One of its goals is to facilitate access to medical services in remote rural communities. There is also m-health (mobile health), which makes it possible to offer services via numerous applications available on smartphones/tablets. Some of these applications make it easier for physicians to monitor their patients remotely.
These services aim to provide real-time monitoring of patients, obtain a rapid and precise diagnosis to improve the results of treatments, and allow more effective detection of diseases. Wearable devices, which are part of E-health, are also vital for patient monitoring. You can go through this Review of Taopatch, one of the best wearable devices for MS Pain Relief.
E-health appears to be one of the major solutions to the great challenges of our time. The aging of the population in particular and the increase in the diagnosis of chronic diseases (cancer, hypertension, diabetes, heart failure, Parkinson’s, etc.).
Modern Technologies in Healthcare
Among the recent technologies recognized to have great potential in the health sector, we can mention:
- Internet of Things (or IoT): IoT is an information infrastructure that allows objects (physical or virtual) to be interconnected using a communication system (RFID chips, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc. .). In healthcare, IoT can be used to connect multiple devices and medical devices to provide real-time information to healthcare professionals. With the IoT begins the ability to collect, sort, and analyze data in real-time on an unprecedented scale.
- Big data: it is a set of voluminous data (content, images, videos …) the usual management tools can not handle alone. “Big Data” in health makes it possible to relate this data to obtain a more precise idea of the medical problem being treated. The increasing volume of this data, however, requires the use of powerful management systems. Artificial intelligence will play a significant role in the management of this data.
- Artificial Intelligence: it refers to a set of techniques enabling machines to simulate human intelligence and perform functions usually associated with humans: reasoning, understanding, adaptation, etc.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, it is now possible to obtain precise answers to medical problems very quickly.
What Changes for Us Patients?
Today E-health is mainly known to the general public through mobile applications (smartphones, tablets), the objective of which is to improve daily well-being and monitor the patient’s state of health while gradually familiarizing them with the emergence of these new technologies. Activity trackers, calorie counters, pedometers, pregnancy monitoring, or even hypnosis mask, the possibilities are numerous (over 100,000), varied and sometimes accompanied by a connected object (watch, scale, patch, etc.).
It also invests our homes with, for example, programmable electronic pill dispensers allowing more precise monitoring of treatments, prescribed doses, or even different times of intake. While these services are still targeting people in good health and a preventive context, devices are gradually appearing to provide more precise diagnoses of our state of health.
