What is eHealth

One major reason for implementing what is often referred to as eHealth is to challenge today’s and tomorrows overall healthcare issues emanating from changes in demographics, increasing amounts of chronically and multi-disease patients, unnecessary  “mistakes” and lack of resources; financial as well as personnel. All these issues can be summarized in three focus areas: improving medical outcome, patient safety and efficiency.
Therefore, in general terms, the concept of eHealth is very wide and a lot of various definitions can be found. Some examples illustrating this are:

“e-health is an emerging field in the intersection of medical informatics, public health and business, referring to health services and information delivered or enhanced through the Internet and related technologies. In a broader sense, the term characterizes not only a technical development, but also a state-of-mind, a way of thinking, an attitude, and a commitment for networked, global thinking, to improve health care locally, regionally, and worldwide by using information and communication technology”
(Eysenbach, 2001)

“eHealth means Information and Communication Technologies tools and services for health. Whether eHealth tools are used behind the scenes by healthcare professionals, or directly by patients, they play a significant role in improving the health of European citizens.”
(Europe’s Information Society, 2009)

“The application of information and communication technologies (ICT) across the whole range of functions which one way or another, affect the health of citizens and patients.”
(eEurope - eHealth2003, 2003)

“The use of electronic information and communications technologies to provide and support health care wherever the participants are located”
(Brommey, 2003)

“eHealth is the application of information and communications technologies (ICT) across the whole range of functions that affect health.”
(Silber, 2003)

 “eHealth (also written e-health) is a relatively recent term for healthcare practice which is supported by electronic processes and communication. The term is inconsistently used: some would argue it is interchangeable with health care informatics and a sub set of health informatics, while others use it in the narrower sense of healthcare practice using the Internet. The term can encompass a range of services that are at the edge of medicine/healthcare and information technology:
• Electronic Health Records: enable easy communication of patient data between different healthcare professionals (GPs, specialists, care team, pharmacy)
• Telemedicine: includes all types of physical and psychological measurements that do not require a patient to travel to a specialist. When this service works, patients need to travel less to a specialist or conversely the specialist has a larger catchment area.
• Consumer Health Informatics (or citizen-oriented information provision): both healthy individuals and patients want to be informed on medical topics.
• Health knowledge management (or specialist-oriented information provision): e.g. in an overview of latest medical journals, best practice guidelines or epidemiological tracking. Examples include physician resources such as Medscape and MDLinx.
• Virtual healthcare teams: consist of healthcare professionals who collaborate and share information on patients through digital equipment (for transmural care).
• mHealth or m-Health: includes the use of mobile devices in collecting aggregate and patient level health data, providing healthcare information to practitioners, researchers, and patients, real-time monitoring of patient vitals, and direct provision of care (via mobile telemedicine).
• Medical research uses eHealth Grids that provide powerful computing and data management capabilities to handle large amounts of heterogeneous data.
• Healthcare Information Systems: also often refer to software solutions for appointment scheduling, patient data management, work schedule management and other administrative tasks surrounding health. Whether these tasks are part of eHealth depends on the chosen definition, they do, however, interface with most eHealth implementations due to the complex relationship between administration and healthcare at Health Care Providers.”                     
 (From Wikipedia, 2010)

 “e-Health: an overarching term used to describe the application of information and communications technologies in the health sector. It encompasses a range of purposes from purely administrative through to health care delivery.”
(Ontario Budget, 2008)

Pre-hospital eHealth
Pre-hospital eHealth can be interpreted as eHealth solutions applied outside the hospital walls but interacting with hospitals or other healthcare facilities in order to support remote care and integrated care processes. The area may include solutions supporting healthcare and health promotion in remote or mobile settings e.g. mobile professional healthcare workers, healthcare support to remote places like oil-rigs or rural healthcare units, etc., but mostly the referenced area is ambulance care. Ortivus MobiMed for ambulance services is therefore one example on pre-hospital eHealth.

Ortivus eHealth definition and pre-hospital offer
For Ortivus eHealth is interpreted as a field where a combination of IT, telecommunication, traditional medical technology and healthcare specific knowledge is combined to provide tools, solutions and services that improve healthcare processes, medical outcome, patient safety and efficiency. For MobiMed specifically the sub-area addressed is ambulance care and its interaction with other healthcare stakeholders.

With MobiMed Ortivus provide means to address the three Healthcare focus areas, improving medical outcome, patient safety and efficiency, within the ambulance sector. In many cases the solution is to improve the possibilities to develop and support care processes or fast tracks for particular diseases. In other situations it means improving the early decision making process or selecting the most appropriate care level for each individual. It can also mean improving documentation and information sharing across stakeholder borders.

References/links
What is e-health?: Eysenbach, 2001;
What is eHealth?: eEurope - eHealth2003;
Challenges in e-health service delivery: Brommey, 2003;
The case for eHealth: Silber. D, 2003;
Ontario Budget 2008: Glossary;
eHealth, Wikipedia, 2010;
eHealth – a definition, 2010;
What Is eHealth (3): A Systematic Review of Published Definitions;
What is eHealth, EU, 2009