What is e-health?

Bibliographic Data

ID23347889
AuthorsGunther Eysenbach (0000-0001-6479-5330, corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume3
Issue2
Pagese20
Publication date2001-06-18
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Medical Internet Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1438-8871 • E-ISSN: 1438-8871
PublisherJMIR Publications Inc. (PUBLISHER • CA)
DOI10.2196/jmir.3.2.e20
PMID11720962
OpenAlexW2030677354
LanguageEN
Citations received113

Everybody talks about e-health these days, but few people have come up with clear definition of this comparatively term. Barely in use before 1999, this term now seems to serve as general buzzword, used to characterize not only medicine, but also virtually everything related to computers and medicine. The term was apparently first used by industry leaders and marketing people rather than academics. They created and used this term in line with other e-words such as e-commerce, e-business, e-solutions, and so on, in an attempt to convey the promises, principles, excitement (and hype) around e-commerce (electronic commerce) to the health arena, and to give an account of the possibilities the Internet is opening up to the area of health Intel, for example, referred to e-health as a concerted effort undertaken by leaders in health care and hi-tech industries to fully harness the benefits available through convergence of the Internet and health care. Because the Internet created opportunities and challenges to the traditional health care information technology industry, the use of term to address these issues seemed appropriate. These new challenges for the health care information technology industry were mainly (1) the capability of consumers to interact with their systems online (B2C = business to consumer); (2) improved possibilities for institutionto-institution transmissions of data (B2B = business to business); (3) possibilities for peerto-peer communication of consumers (C2C = consumer to consumer).

Business · Health care · Internet privacy · Political science · Public relations · The Internet · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Health Literacy and Information Accessibility · Marketing · Social Media in Health Education · Web and Library Services