Clinical information systems, administrative information systems, decision support
systems, and the internet and eHealth are health services delivery IT in healthcare. eHealth
is an emerging field at the intersection of medical informatics, public health, and business,
referring to health services and information delivered or enhanced through the Internet and
related technologies (Eysenbach, 2001). eHealth includes all forms of electronic health
care delivered over the Internet such as information, education, products, and services.
Commonly practiced services include E-therapy-online interactions between a mental
health professional and patient, distance medicine, remote in-home monitoring, and tele-
ICU (Shi & Singh, 2019). Connected data are the primary source of knowledge. Internet of
Things (IoT) rigorously analyzes and processes this knowledge by connecting data from
different entities to provide smart services. IoT holds outstanding importance and
application in healthcare technologies through machine-to-machine and machine-to-person
communication. The smart environment assimilates the data from heterogeneous sources
and uses it to generate intelligence. In the context of eHealth, connected data from IoT
helps patients facilitate efficient treatment through mutual knowledge sharing. The main
functions of knowledge sharing include virtually storing the patient data to make it easily
accessible to healthcare personnel and establishing an intelligent clinical decision support
system to assist the doctors during the treatment phase. The new age eHealth facilities
should enable end-to-end monitoring systems even in remote scenarios, helping medical
services reach the unreached. (Chatterjee & Armentano, 2015).
Technology diffusion is the process by which innovations are adopted by a
population. Americans demand state-of-the-art medical technology despite its
astronomical costs and emphasize medical specialization. Capitalism and lack of
government intervention in the United States promote innovation. The high rate of
diffusion and utilization of technology in the United States are due to American cultural
beliefs and values, the nature of medical training and practice, insurance coverage, and
competition among providers. Medical training in the United States focuses on
specialization over primary care. Specialists use more technology than primary care
physicians. The lack of checks and balances in the United States to determine the
appropriateness of high-cost services and insurance controls the costs of patients and
providers from the utilization. Specialization is an enticement to attract insured patients
and recruit specialists among providers creating a perception of higher quality (Shi &
Singh, 2019). Technology diffusion is driven by a combination of payers, regulatory
bodies, pandemics, consumer demand, and technologies like AI to stretch the capacity of
providers and assist them in patient care (Shenoy & Hileman, 2021).
Thank you,
Jhabindra
References
Chatterjee, P., & Armentano, R. L. (2015). Internet of things for a smart and ubiquitous
eHealth system. 2015 International Conference on Computational Intelligence
and Communication Networks (CICN). https://doi.org/10.1109/cicn.2015.178
Eysenbach, G. (2001). What is e-Health? Journal of Medical Internet Research, 3(2),
e20. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.3.2.e20
Shenoy, S., & Hileman, G. (2021, February 17). Diffusion of technology in health care.
The Actuary Magazine. https://theactuarymagazine.org/diffusion-of-technology-
in-health-care/
Shi, & Singh, D. A. (2019). Essentials of the U.S. health care system (5th ed.). Jones &
Bartlett Publishers.
