In the past five years, we have witnessed remarkable advancements in technological innovations — including mobile phones, tablets, remote patient monitoring devices, and sensors — that drive so-called “digital health” around the world. Increasingly, these innovations are also equipped with GPS and metrics that generate promising evidence of their cost-saving and, more importantly, life-saving capabilities.
The technologies alone are not enough, however. To truly harness the power of these trends, we need a Global Digital Health Index that will drive the expanded use of life-saving digital health technologies by making health systems more transparent, resilient, responsive, and better able to meet the needs of the population.
A Transparency Market Research study, titled “eHealth Market – Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2015 – 2023”, offers the latest insights into the global eHealth market. In the recent past, the global eHealth market has experienced growth at a fast pace and the market is expected to witness steady growth in nearly all regions of the world.
In electronic health or eHealth, electronic means are used for healthcare practices. eHealth involves management and delivery of health-related information between healthcare professionals and patients using the Internet and telecommunication. It also draws from e-commerce and e-business to manage health systems. The use of IT and e-commerce by healthcare professionals is helping improve public health services significantly.
Read more: Global eHealth Market to Benefit from Technological Advancement
The British microprocessor design giant ARM has tweeted 15 predictions for 2015. Some of them are incomprehensible geekspeak: “Benchmark data will shift end-user choice to purpose-optimized servers versus monolithic approaches”. But not this:
"Mobile operators will deploy smartphone services as de facto healthcare for rural areas."
Today ICT not only means the call you make to relatives on the other side of the world, or the quick email you send through your mobile phone. ICT is now something much more deeply woven into the fabric of our lives; it allows students to remotely connect to their university classes, or expats to send money back home through a simple SMS. ICT is the thread that has the potential to connect everyone and everything important around the world, including in the area of health.
Read more: Key role for Information and Communication Technology in health care
The new standard will enable different e-health systems to smoothly exchange patient health data in both low- and high-resource settings, making it ideal for applications in both developed and developing countries.
Read more: New UN Standard to improve e-health interoperability