Exploring the E-Health Frontier

Exploring the E-Health Frontier

Have you succumbed to the big "E" yet? It's a pervasive part of our lives, touching nearly everything we do at work and at play. I'm talking about electronic everything: e-mail, e-commerce and especially, e-health. E-health is one of those buzzwords insinuating itself into our lexicon as we immerse ourselves in all things electronic. It is an integral part of managed care and health-delivery organizations and it is rapidly changing the economics and relationships within the industry. E-health also is an equal-opportunity revolution; even as clinicians rush to embrace electronic medical records, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and telemedicine, healthcare consumers are turning the Internet into their own personal e-physician.

The state of online healthcare is alive and well, confirms The Boston Consulting Group (BCG)'s new report, "Vital Signs: E-Health in the United States." The report's findings are based on surveys of more than 400 physicians and more than 10,000 patients in the United States. Physicians continue to move online and to report that the information they find in the virtual realm influences their real-world medical decisions in significant ways. And more doctors than ever before are adopting online tools to deliver patient care. The Internet's reach has expanded and its call to action has increased among the overall patient population, BCG says.

"E-health is continuing to alter the competitive landscape by enhancing access to healthcare information and services and by introducing gains in quality, efficiency, accuracy and cost-effectiveness into the overall heathcare mix," says Carina von Knoop, one of the report's authors and head of BCG's E-health topic area. "It is influencing physicians' medical knowledge, diagnoses and prescribing decisions, and is shifting patients' expectations about the care they receive. This has powerful implications for the E-health strategies of healthcare players seeking to influence patient and physician behavior."

In this month's cover story, managing editor John Roark explores the seemingly endless boundaries of the vast e-health frontier, which represents a dazzling array of online tools and technology used for diagnosing, monitoring and managing health conditions, as well as electronic prescribing, electronic medical records and remote disease monitoring. It looks like clinicians are eager to incorporate this technology into their medical tool chests; the BCG reports that approximately 40 percent more clinicians have added at least one of the three tools to their online repertoire during the past year.

BCG says E-prescribing is one area that will have a major impact on the entire healthcare industry in the next five years, potentially transforming relationships between managed care players and pharmaceutical companies. Current figures from the BCG study show 36 percent of patients now desire computerized prescriptions, with about the same percentage of doctors using or planning to use the tool.

Clinicians are not the only ones having all the fun with e-health. At least 80 percent of all patients BCG surveyed now search the Internet for information about health-related topics. Exactly how patients use the Internet and how they are influenced by the information they find there continues to differ on the basis of the severity of their illness and their attitudes about their own role in their health care. E-health's impact is most pronounced among patients whose conditions are most severe, who visit their doctor most frequently and who take the greatest number of prescription drugs.

While the Internet will never take the place of a clinician, experts do believe that e-health will serve as a bridge between them, facilitating information gathering and sharing and using this convergence to improve the quality of healthcare overall. Who knew that getting wired could be so good for your health?

Until next month,

Kelly M. Pyrek
Editor in Chief
kpyrek@vpico.com