Global Observatory for eHealth

15 December 2009

eHealth Worldwide

  • China - E-health in China, our practice and exploration. (8 December 2009 - IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society)
    China started to pay more attention to regional and national health information network construction after the SARS epidemic outbreak in 2003. The Chinese government marks the public health system construction as the most urgent part of national medical reform, with information and computer tech-nology(ICT) being considered as the key of deploying regional collaborative medical service(RCMS), which is also known as e-Health. In this paper, we firstly analyze the difficulties of carrying out e-health projects in China and then present the active attempts, finally a case representing current progress is presented and studied.
  • EU - The Applicability of Existing Community Legal Framework to Telemedicine Services (7 December 2009 - eHealthNews)
    Telemedicine can help increase accessibility to healthcare for patients living in remote geographical areas, allow patients with chronic diseases to be monitored at home and involve patients in the management of their own healthcare.
  • EU & US - The Socio-Economic Impact of Interoperable EHR and ePrescribing Systems in Europe and Beyond (3 December 2009 - eHealthNews)
    The European Commission EHR IMPACT study (EHRI) investigates the socio-economic impact of interoperable Electronic Health Record (EHR) and ePrescribing systems in Europe and beyond. Core to the project is a detailed qualitative analysis of eleven good practice cases in Europe, USA and Israel. Nine of these underwent also a quantitative evaluation of their socioeconomic impacts. Each application studied is a sustainable solution in routine operation.
  • France - French wireless carrier Orange courts mHealth (10 December 2009 - MobiHealthNews)
    By David Doherty, 3G Doctor At Informa’s Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit in London last week, Thierry Zylberberg, General Manager Health Business at France Telecom gave an important lesson to wireless carriers and retailers as to how they can profit from mHealth today, as he revealed details of the Mondial “Care & Assistance” option being offered on contract.
  • Ghana - Senate health reform; Ghana maternal health; Mental health via SMS (1 December 2009 - MobiHealthNews)
    Senate bill includes wireless health: InformationWeek reports that the health reform bill in the Senate includes support for the use of home health technologies for managing chronically ill patients in their own homes with a focus on reducing hospitalizations. Specifically the bill calls for health IT “in providing health home services and improving service delivery
  • Indonesia: Teenagers get sex education from Internet, not parents (8 December 2009 - The Jakarta Post)
    Amid the high spread of HIV and AIDS through sexual contact in Indonesia, youths are still finding it hard to discuss sexuality and safe sex with their parents due to the taboo surrounding the topic. The World Health Organization (WHO) said condoms were the only contraceptive method proven to reduce the risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV. They can be used as a dual-purpose method, both for preventing pregnancy and protection against STIs. The WHO also said laboratory studies have found that viruses do not pass through intact latex condoms even when devices are stretched or stressed.
  • Tanzania: Hospitals in Tanzania Test Digital Pen (IICD)
    The pen can convert doctor’s handwriting into a digital file which is easier to archive and takes up less space. The test is a small part of an IICD-supported project to digitise hospital data, and will take place at Evangelical Lutheran Church Tanzania (ELCT) hospitals in Arusha and Mwanza in January 2010.
  • Spain - Telefónica Develops Advanced Telehealth (14 December 2009 - eHealth Europe)
    “The mobile system is able to collect five different vital signs as well as detecting falls and transmits the data to a caretaker center that can be accessed by doctors, caretakers or family members according to the individual circumstances.” The system uses GPS to locate the user so that if a medical emergency occurs, help can be directed to wherever the right place at the right time. According to the company, Telefónica has made privacy a key priority and ensured that all patient information is encrypted.
  • US - New Mexico awaits decision on extension centers (7 December 2009 - HealthCare IT News
    By Dec. 11 the New Mexico Health Information Collaborative will find out whether it will be one of the first-round picks to become a federal Health IT Regional Extension Center.
  • US - Social Media Use in the United States: Implications for Health Communication (J Med Internet Res 2009;11(4):e48)
    Given the rapid changes in the communication landscape brought about by participative Internet use and social media, it is important to develop a better understanding of these technologies and their impact on health communication. The first step in this effort is to identify the characteristics of current social media users. Up-to-date reporting of current social media use will help monitor the growth of social media and inform health promotion/communication efforts aiming to effectively utilize social media. The purpose of the study is to identify the sociodemographic and health-related factors associated with current adult social media users in the United States.
  • US - White House pushes IT as 'pillar' of cost-containing health reform (25 November 2009 - HealthCare IT News)
    White House officials said Wednesday that healthcare IT is key to containing healthcare costs in the future. In a conference call with reporters, Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, said healthcare IT adoption is one of the four pillars upon which the Obama Administration is basing its healthcare strategy.
  • US - $600M to boost construction, IT at community health centers (9 December 2009 - HealthCare IT News)
    Nearly $600 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding has been earmarked for community health center construction and renovation projects and to help networks of health centers adopt electronic healthcare records and other health IT systems. President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that $88 million of the grant money will be used to help community health centers replace paper records with EHRs and build other healthcare IT systems to improve care and manage clinical support services.

Scientific Articles

  • A multi-centre randomised controlled study of pre-IVF outpatient hysteroscopy in women with recurrent IVF implantation failure: Trial of Outpatient Hysteroscopy (Reprod Health. 2009 Dec 3;6(1):2)
    The success rate of IVF treatment is low. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis found that the outcome of IVF treatment could be improved in patients who have experienced recurrent implantation failure if an outpatient hysteroscopy (OH) is performed before starting the new treatment cycle. However, the trials were of variable quality, leading to a call for a large and high-quality randomised trial. This protocol describes a multi-centre randomised controlled trial to test the hypothesis that performing an OH prior to starting an IVF cycle improves the live birth rate of the subsequent IVF cycle in women who have experienced two to four failed IVF cycles.
  • Can the influenza epidemic be predicted by data from the Internet? (Gac Sanit. 2009 Dec 5)
    Our apologies, no abstract is available.
  • Consultant: Healthcare IT market to grow at 'impressive' rate (10 November 2009 - HealthCare IT News)
    Health information technology is the fastest growing segment of the $1 trillion global healthcare marketplace, and the "impressive" 11 percent combined annual growth rate is likely to continue through 2013, according to a Scientia Advisors global review released Tuesday. According to Scientia, a global management advisory firm with offices in Cambridge, Mass., and Palo Alto, Calif., healthcare IT sales will grow by 25 percent, from 4 percent to 5 percent of the worldwide healthcare market, by 2013.
  • Economic Evaluation of Telemedicine: Review of the Literature and Research Guidelines for Benefit–Cost Analysis (2 December 2009 - Telemedicine and eHealth)
    Telemedicine programs provide specialty health services to remote populations using telecommunications technology. This innovative approach to medical care delivery has been expanding for several years and currently covers various specialty areas such as cardiology, dermatology, and pediatrics. Economic evaluations of telemedicine, however, remain rare, and few of those conducted have accounted for the wide range of economic costs and benefits. Rigorous benefit–cost analyses of telemedicine programs could provide credible and comparative evidence of their economic viability and thus lead to the adoption and/or expansion of the most successful programs. To facilitate more advanced economic evaluations, this article presents research guidelines for conducting benefit–cost analyses of telemedicine programs, emphasizing opportunity cost estimation, commonly used program outcomes, and monetary conversion factors to translate outcomes to dollar values. The article concludes with specific recommendations for future research.
  • E-health: how to make the right choice. (Nurs Forum. 2009 Oct-Dec;44(4):277-82.)
    TOPIC. The online health promotion phenomenon is a pivotal movement toward consumer empowerment. The challenges for the 21st century are to create meaningful, accurate online health communication interventions that successfully change behavior and improve health. PURPOSE. The Internet is a valuable tool for health promotion, self-care tools, and decision aids components for a high-quality care. The nurse educator ensures e-health sites used meet the criteria for achieving optimal wellness for the consumer. SOURCES. Published literature. CONCLUSIONS. It is crucial for nurses to use reputable e-health sites for consumer engagement and education. Researchers and practitioners are exploring the phenomenon of e-health to gain a better understanding of how to engage these consumers in health behavioral change programs.
  • Evaluating eHealth: How to Make Evaluation More Methodologically Robust (24 November 2009 - PLOS Medicine)
    Summary Points: Evaluation of information technology (IT) systems often requires a mixed methods approach.; External evaluations have many advantages, especially in terms of standardisation, independence, and the possibility of using controlled before and after designs.; Difficulties arise when commissioners ask external evaluations to also provide formative assessments designed to assist in the implementation itself. Under these circumstances the summative results, which encapsulate the overall benefits and harms of a system, may be rendered less generalisable.; We think researchers and commissioners should resist the current fashion of asking external academic teams to combine formative with summative assessments.
  • The e-patient: a survey of israeli primary care physicians' responses to patients' use of online information during the consultation (Isr Med Assoc J. 2009 Sep;11(9):537-41.)
    BACKGROUND: The Internet has transformed the patient-physician relationship by empowering patients with information. Because physicians are no longer the primary gatekeepers of medical information, shared decision making is now emerging as the hallmark of the patient-physician relationship. OBJECTIVES: To assess the reactions of primary care physicians to encounters in which patients present information obtained from the Internet (e-patients) and to examine the influence of the physicians' personal and demographic characteristics on their degree of satisfaction with e-patients.
  • How are the websites of pharmaceutical companies directed at users? (Aten Primaria. 2009 Dec 1)
    OBJECTIVE: To describe the content and structure of the websites of pharmaceutical companies (PC) with health information to patients. DESIGN: Descriptive, cross-sectional. MAIN MEASUREMENTS: health topics treated, and 9 sections: objectives and target population; editorial policy, authoring, updating of content, personal data protection, interactivity, accessibility, advertising labels. SETTING: Internet. PARTICIPANTS: All PC websites with patient health information in Spanish.
  • Implementation and performance evaluation of mobile ad hoc network for Emergency Telemedicine System in disaster areas. (Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2009;1:1663-6.)
    So far we have developed Emergency Telemedicine System (ETS) which is a robust system using heterogeneous networks. In disaster areas, however, ETS cannot be used if the primary network channel is disabled due to damages on the network infrastructures. Thus we designed network management software for disaster communication network by combination of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) and Wireless LAN (WLAN). This software maintains routes to a Backbone Gateway Node in dynamic network topologies. In this paper, we introduce the proposed disaster communication network with management software, and evaluate its performance using ETS between Medical Center and simulated disaster areas. We also present the results of network performance analysis which identifies the possibility of actual Telemedicine Service in disaster areas via MANET and mobile network (e.g. HSDPA, WiBro).
  • Portable emergency telemedicine system over wireless broadband and 3G networks. (Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2009;1:1250-3.)
    The telemedicine system aims at monitoring patients remotely without limit in time and space. However the existing telemedicine systems exchange medical information simply in a specified location. Due to increasing speed in processing data and expanding bandwidth of wireless networks, it is possible to perform telemedicine services on personal digital assistants (PDA). In this paper, a telemedicine system on PDA was developed using wideband mobile networks such as Wi-Fi, HSDPA, and WiBro for high speed bandwidths. This system enables to utilize and exchange variety and reliable patient information of video, biosignals, chatting messages, and triage data. By measuring bandwidths of individual data of the system over wireless networks, and evaluating the performance of this system using PDA, we demonstrated the feasibility of the designed portable emergency telemedicine system.
  • Young children's ability to recognize advertisements in web page designs. (Br J Dev Psychol. 2009 Mar;27(Pt 1):71-83.)
    Identifying what is, and what is not an advertisement is the first step in realizing that an advertisement is a marketing message. Children can distinguish television advertisements from programmes by about 5 years of age. Although previous researchers have investigated television advertising, little attention has been given to advertisements in other media, even though other media, especially the Internet, have become important channels of marketing to children. We showed children printed copies of invented web pages that included advertisements, half of which had price information, and asked the children to point to whatever they thought was an advertisement. In two experiments we tested a total of 401 children, aged 6, 8, 10 and 12 years of age, from the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Six-year-olds recognized a quarter of the advertisements, 8-year-olds recognized half the advertisements, and the 10- and 12-year-olds recognized about three-quarters. Only the 10- and 12-year-olds were more likely to identify an advertisement when it included a price. We contrast our findings with previous results about the identification of television advertising, and discuss why children were poorer at recognizing web page advertisements. The performance of the children has implications for theories about how children develop an understanding of advertising.

Articles

Reports

  • EC study finds investments in health IT benefit society (9 December 2009 - HealthCare IT News)
    Electronic health records and e-prescribing are beneficial to society but require net cash injections to prove their value, a European Commission study has found. A socio-economic analysis showed the societal gains of interoperable EHRs and e-prescribing systems eventually exceed the costs of implementing the technology. It often takes a "considerable length of time" for such return on the IT investment to be realized, the study found.
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