Abu's Individual Post - 1

HCM 934 Health Information and Communication Systems, first blog post

Abu Zakir

Here are the PDF documents that I read.

Building Foundationsfor eHealth, pages 1-22 & 67-71

Implementation ThroughForce or Measure? pages 1-12

Overview of GlobaleHealth Initiatives, pages 3-30

A Systematic LiteratureReview of Cloud Computing in eHealth, pages 11-17

One helpful thing that I learned in this reading was benefit of eHealth and the paragraph contains combination of all the pdf files.

1.      Benefit of eHealth: eHealth is providing health information to the general public and important helpful information to the professionals as well as alerting and supporting the administration for privacy. Personal digital assistants (PDAs) have already been used successfully for data collection and easy to access medical information for anybody. In case of emergency, professionals can provide care if they find identity to any unconscious person who is unable to sign consent. European Commission developed wearable computing devices which able to monitor the health of patients working in extreme stress situations. eHealth eliminate or limited medications errors. For example, after getting an electronic order from a physician, the order needs to be verified by a pharmacist or a nurse. Before administering medication, the nurse has to pull medications from the medicine cart by using pass code and using the name of the patient. Then the medication has to be scanned to make sure the patient is getting the right dose.

I also learned the challenges of implementing eHealth globally and it’s also combination of four pdf files I read.

2.      Challenges: Developed countries like England, Canada, United States, France, Australia, Austria, Singapore, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia invested heavily in eHealth. Those developed countries generate so many programs to deploy e-prescription, appointment scheduling, sharing health records via messages, unambiguous methods of data entry, connects hospitals, pharmacies, GP practices, labs. But the challenge is for the developing countries where essential needs like water and sanitation, housing, food, and basic education are not being met. So the problem with the low-income countries that they might invest limited resources in dazzling equipment. The greatest challenge is to convince people that eHealth is a helpful system to improve health performance, provide more knowledge, and more control to make decision to get better outcome for patient. Another challenge is user’s resistance to adopt with a new system in an organizational environment. Institutional pressures like coercive, mimetic, and normative pressure on an individual user’s may resist a technology.  Other factors like government pressure or public opinion, affect user behavior. For example, German Electronic Health Card, an eHealth program which has been resisted by the resident medical doctors for years. eHealth sometimes fails for insufficient or misaligned funding, unclear leadership, or conflicts between stakeholders, standardization and interoperability, and poor communication of the need of eHealth.

Finally, I learned about the future plan of different organizations to implement eHealth and this paragraph is also combination of four pdf files.

3.      Hope: World Health Organization and other organizations working together to spread the benefit of eHealth to the developing countries all over the world. The Fifty-eight World Health Assembly adopted resolution WHA58.28 to establish an eHealth strategy for World Health Organization. This resolution urged the countries to find out appropriate eHealth plan for their countries. WHO also launched the Global Observatory for eHealth to study how it impact the health of the people of those countries by providing support to national governments and international bodies in improving policies, practice, and management of eHealth. WHO is playing a central role and monitoring the development of eHealth worldwide especially in low and middle income countries. eHealth is a global phenomenon and those countries are likely to achieve the best results in the implementation of eHealth if they learn from other country or regional successes as well as failure.