Customer-Driven Medicine: How to Create a New Health Care System By: Darrell M. West

Executive Summary

Health care today is dominated by physicians, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies, and government agencies. Patients seek to navigate their health care by moving across a variety of providers, ordering prescription drugs from pharmacies, and seeking reimbursement from either public or private insurance plans. They spend hours connecting the dots and working out the best health care for themselves and their families. If they are fortunate to have good providers and effective follow-through, they receive high-quality health care.

Types of Telemedicine

Telemedicine can be broken into three main categories: store-and-forward, remote monitoring and interactive services.

Store-and-forward telemedicine involves acquiring medical data (like medical images, biosignals etc) and then transmitting this data to a doctor or medical specialist at a convenient time for assessment offline. It does not require the presence of both parties at the same time. Dermatology (cf: teledermatology), radiology, and pathology are common specialties that are conducive to asynchronous telemedicine. A properly structured Medical Record preferably in electronic form should be a component of this transfer. A key difference between traditional in-person patient meetings and telemedicine encounters is the omission of an actual physical examination and history. The store-and-forward process requires the clinician to rely on a history report and audio/video information in lieu of a physical examination.

What is Telemedicine?

Telemedicine is a rapidly developing application of clinical medicine where medical information is transferred through the phone or the Internet and sometimes other networks for the purpose of consulting, and sometimes remote medical procedures or examinations.

Telemedicine may be as simple as two health professionals discussing a case over the telephone, or as complex as using satellite technology and video-conferencing equipment to conduct a real-time consultation between medical specialists in two different countries. Telemedicine generally refers to the use of communications and information technologies for the delivery of clinical care.

Google Just Became a Doctor? Improving health searches, because your health matters

Every day, people search on Google for health information. Many of these searches relate to symptoms they or their loved ones may be experiencing. You might be trying to understand why you’ve had a headache every morning for a week or why your child has a tummy ache all of a sudden. Our data shows that a search for symptoms is often followed by a search for a related condition.

E-Health: Improving Health And Healthcare Through The Use Of Information And Communications Technologies

 The «e-Health» action plan shows how to use information and communications technologies (ICT) to provide better quality healthcare throughout Europe, at a stable or lower cost, and to reduce waiting times and errors. The aim of the action plan is the creation of a «European e-Health Area» and it identifies practical steps to achieve this by developing electronic systems for health records, patient identifiers and health cards, and the faster rollout of high speed internet access for health systems to allow the full potential of e-Health to be delivered. The ultimate aim is for e-Health to become the norm among the healthcare profession, patients and the general population by the end of the decade.

Apple iPad Poised for Telemedicine, Mobile Health Care

Is Apple’s handheld computer, the iPad, just what the doctor ordered for telehealth and telemedicine? It certainly looks that way, according to two mobile health care industry watchers.

«While Apple CEO Steve Jobs… did not mention the health care vertical as a key market for the iPad: It looks to be just that. The iPad holds promise as a new point-of-care tool for health care workers and as a personal health device for patients,» writes Brian Dolan, editor of MobiHealthNews.com.

What is e-health?

Everybody talks about e-health these days, but few people have come up with a clear definition of this comparatively new term. Barely in use before 1999, this term now seems to serve as a general «buzzword,» used to characterize not only «Internet 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 new possibilities the Internet is opening up to the area of health care. 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 new opportunities and challenges to the traditional health care information technology industry, the use of a new 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 institution-to-institution transmissions of data (B2B = «business to business»); (3) new possibilities for peer-to-peer communication of consumers (C2C = «consumer to consumer»).

Using Health Information Technology to Manage Your Information

Using health information technology to manage your personal health information is an important part of our changing health care system. You and your doctor can better manage your health care by improving how you communicate with each other and how you maintain your health information.

Using computers and other electronic devices makes it easy for you, your doctor, and other health care providers (such as hospitals, labs, and X-ray facilities) to store, share and access your health information. Using computers in this way is known as Health Information Technology (HIT) or Health IT.

H Google Βελτιώνει Την Αναζήτηση Για Θέματα Υγείας

Καθημερινά γίνονται εκατομμύρια αναζητήσεις από τους χρήστες του διαδικτύου σχετικά με αρρώστιες και συμπτώματα υγείας. Ένα σημάδι στο δέρμα, ένας πόνος στο κεφάλι, ένας περίεργος ερεθισμός στο πέλμα είναι μερικοί από τους λόγους που οι άνθρωποι αναζητούν περισσότερη πληροφόρηση διότι θέλουν να ξέρουν. Οι ενεργοί καταναλωτές υγειονομικής περίθαλψης χρησιμοποιούν το διαδίκτυο για να ενημερώνονται για τις ασθένειες και τις προτεινόμενες θεραπείες τους.

Τα Smartphones Για Τη Διάγνωση Οφθαλμολογικών Παθήσεων

Η αποστολή της φωτογραφίας του ασθενή στον οφθαλμίατρο μέσω smartphone μπορεί να διευκολύνει τη δουλειά των γιατρών στα τμήματα επειγόντων περιστατικών, στο να κάνουν μια γρήγορη διάγνωση για την κατάσταση της όρασής του.

Όπως αναφέρεται σε άρθρο του επιστημονικού εντύπου Archives of Ophthalmology, δύο οφθαλμίατροι αξιολόγησαν καλύτερα τις φωτογραφίες του έσω οφθαλμού όταν τις μελέτησαν μέσω iPhone, συγκριτικά με την οθόνη του ηλεκτρονικού υπολογιστή.

Αυτό ίσως σημαίνει ότι τα έξυπνα κινητά μπορεί στο μέλλον να