Telemedicine and Digitalhealth

Personalized eHealth

Personalized e-Health is a healthcare ideal accentuating the systematic use of context information about an individual patient to optimize the patient's preventative and therapeutic care. A widespread ICT solutions for patient self-management includes medical sensor-enabled remote monitoring, smart-phone enabled data aggregation, medical situation awareness and analysis (risk classification, root cause analysis and risk triggers), and Diagnostics using Biosensors for converged disease risk management and patient behavior assistance toward prevention care or prediction of diseases for better disease risk control. Personalized eHealth market is becoming a significant socio-economic challenge around the world. For example, US alone spent about US$2.6 Trillion in 2008 (17% of GDP). Major world developed countries (US, EU and Japan) are promoting a new healthcare model, called personalized healthcare, to control the cost while improving citizens’ health through use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and care focus from treatment to prevention. Fundamentals in eHealth personalization, Personalized eHealth business models and eHealth and classical health networks included in the personalized e-Health indicate that business-to-consumers e-commerce models require real-time data that enable users to make informative decisions. E-health models have been categorized into four major frameworks (portals, connectivity, business-to-business, and business-to-consumer) and numerous others; provide patient–consumers with diverse capabilities including access to treatment and diagnostic information, online purchases of prescription drugs, and even personalization of health care plans that are enabled via employee-defined contribution plans.