Leveraging the power of e-Health to achieve healthcare outcomes.

Abstract

The increased availability and use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) including mobile devices has created many new opportunities for supporting the achievement of healthcare outcomes. That is, e-health offers tremendous potential to transform the manner in which health services are delivered and interventions are carried out in the healthcare industry. A plethora of e-health applications are emerging though many are also quickly disappearing, and users are still unsure of the true e-health benefits. In this chapter, we discuss some key developments in e-health. We argue that leveraging their inherent power can create opportunities for achieving tangible outcomes in healthcare. Additionally, this chapter will assist e-health researchers and practitioners channel and focus their research efforts to developing areas. Having extensively reviewed extant research, we focus on health awareness and education, personal health information management, standardization, m-health, and security and privacy.