For me, eHealth is a pinpoint of a paradigm shift in healthcare.
Healthcare used to be part of spiritual or religion because of its ritual and remedies in the primordial and medieval before jumping into scientific revolution by the discovering of the microscope in 1590. The discovery leads to the finding of blood cells in 1670, sterile techniques in 1867, and the germ theory of disease by Loiuse paster in 1870, then hundreds of vaccines for the centuries after, parallel with modern epidemiology developed after Cholera outbreak in London, in 1854. The tool and theory contributed significantly to modern medicine and public health.
For informatics, we also owed to a Persian mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, who developed Algorithms in the 9th century before bringing into significant usage in “electromechanical machine” invented by Alan Turing in 1936. The development and invention have taken us to a new way of how to look at human health today.
Humorously, eHealth is like the outbreak in 1854. eHealth, which can be defined in so many ways, for my opinions, shortly, is the knowledge, information, and data in the form of electronic that can be used to perform health-related practices. So, from what mentioned by Shaw T et al., I like this one;
You know eHealth is really old fashioned? Nobody talks about eHealth anymore. Electronic Health – everything’s electronic! The devices everythings! We’re talking about digital health, digitizing health, not eHealth.
If to define eHealth in practical, in the transitioning period, I’d choose this one;
The patient probably won’t even notice eHealth because that means that we have the right tools in the rights place being able to be used by the patients and clinicians, and that really supports the delivery of the best possible care.
Thus, in my opinion, what we are heading to, in health care is what is cutting-edge, it may be a tool or a theory that can change the way we understand human health. It may be Google’s quantum supremacy (just currently taking of the town) which claims to be a breakthrough in computational science or any new EA in informatics to help us jump into a truely new paradigm in healthcare.
