BACKGROUND Newly established high-technology areas such as eHealth require regulations regarding the interoperability of health information infrastructures and data protection. It is argued that government capacities as well as the extent to which public and private organizations participate in policy-making determine the level of eHealth legislation. Both explanatory factors are influenced by ...

BACKGROUND Many speak of the digital divide, but variation in the opportunity of patients to use the Internet for health (patient eHealth readiness) is not a binary difference, rather a distribution influenced by personal capability, provision of services, support, and cost. Digital divisions in health have been addressed by various initiatives, but there was no comprehensive validated measure ...

Background: Health related information and communication technology is globally an important and growing sector. With the promise of more efficient and cost-effective care, eHealth is becoming a key priority to address the current challenges faced by health systems worldwide. Addressing IT skills for healthcare workforce is seen as an important element of achieving greater social inclusion. Obj...

This cross-national study examines how the relationship between national eHealth initiatives and health outcomes are contingent on (1) macroeconomic stability; (2) GDP per capita; and (3) institutions. Resource Based View’s (RBV) resource complementary perspective and literature on Information Technology and health outcomes are used as the guiding theoretical framework. Publicly available archi...

The design of eHealth systems calls for a clear needs analysis and functions based on the users’ perspective. However, this is often the most difficult part of designing eHealth service systems, because of the diversity of users and diversified needs. This paper provides a general mapping and overview of the basic functions of eHealth systems identified through two studies: (1) a comprehensive ...

Beginning in July 2005, several major medical journals, including the Journal of Medical Internet Research, will only consider trials for publication that have been registered in a trial registry before they started. This is to reduce publication bias and to prevent selective reporting of positive outcomes. As existing clinical trial registers seem to be unsuitable or suboptimal for eHealth stu...

Privacy is recognised as a fundamental requirement for eHealth systems. Proposals to achieve privacy have been put forth in literature, most of which approach patient privacy as either an access control or an authentication problem. In this paper, we investigate privacy in eHealth as a communication problem, since future eHealth systems will be highly distributed and require interoperability of...

BACKGROUND Full recovery after gynecological surgery takes much longer than expected regardless of surgical technique or the level of invasiveness. After discharge, detailed convalescence recommendations are not provided to patients typically, and postoperative care is fragmented, poorly coordinated, and given only on demand. For patients, this contributes to irrational beliefs and avoidance of...

BACKGROUND eHealth literacy is defined as the ability to seek, find, understand, and appraise health information from electronic sources and apply knowledge gained to addressing or solving a health problem. Previous research has shown high reliance on both online and face-to-face interpersonal sources when sharing and receiving health information. OBJECTIVE In this paper, we examine these int...

BACKGROUND The aim of this paper was to ascertain whether greater familiarity with a smartphone or tablet was associated with participants' preferred mobile delivery modality for eHealth interventions. METHODS Data from 1865 people who participated in the Australian Health and Social Science panel study were included into two multinomial logistic regression analyses in which preference for sm...