electronic health (eHealth)

Electronic Health (eHealth) is a concept for the use of computer programs in healthcare and for the electronic processing of health data. A crucial approach of eHealth for the care of chronically ill people living at home is telemedicine with remote patient monitoring via telemonitoring, home health, telehealth or mHealth.

eHealth is techniques for screening, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring and rehabilitation of the sick whose health values are transmitted and monitored via online services and networks such as the Internet of Medical Things( IoMT). It is a symbiosis of information technology and communication capabilities via the Internet. eHealth is an overall concept that starts with home care by means of Ambient Assisted Living( AAL) and with inpatient patient monitoring, stores the laboratory findings of radiology and cardiology, records of medical interventions and the prescribed medications in patient databases, and gives doctors, health insurers and the pharmaceutical industry the opportunity to access knowledge databases and expert systems and to exchange patient data and findings with each other, while complying with the legal requirements of data protection.

In the medium term, eHealth will rely on existing protocols and document architectures. For example, the communication standard for medical documents, Health Level Seven( HL7), the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise( IHE) framework and the document format for hospitals, Clinical Document Architecture( CDA). With eHealth, treating physicians should be able to access centrally stored patient health data such as the electronic patient record(ePA) or the electronic health card(eGK); costly multiple examinations should thus be avoided.