Impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on Health Care

ICT has an impact on many aspects of health care. The most important are accessibility to health care services by citizens, economical aspect and quality of care aspect. The main goal is to provide access for the citizen at any time and in any place. eHealth can certainly provide such an access especially in the regions where physician may not be available. The continuously rising costs are the main problem of the contemporary health service in many countries. These costs may not be acceptable both for developing and developed countries. eHealth can decrease the costs of health care by decentralizing the care enabling medical services at a lower level where they are cheaper (e.g. regional hospital instead of university hospital), or by avoiding patient transport to the hospital when it is not necessary. The improvement of the quality of care has been demonstrated in several medical disciplines e.g. cardiology. The transmission of ECG signal directly from the ambulance to invasive cardiology centre significantly improved Acute Coronary Syndromes patient diagnostics and reduced time from the onset of symptoms to intervention. In developed countries the phenomenon of ageing population is evident. It is estimated that the cost of health care of that group is 60% of the total cost. How eHealth can cope with that problem? The answer is by home monitoring and telecare. The patient data can be trans mitted over the cellular phones to the medical centre and evaluated by the physician. Home monitoring is applied in many types of diseases such as cardiac failure, hypertension, diabetes, COPD. The preliminary results show that in many patients the number of exacerbations and hospitalizations is decreased. The care is therefore improved and costs diminished. eHealth can cope with the deficit of medical staff in developing and the developed countries. Teleradiology is a good example. The images are transmitted to the location where radiologist on duty is available. ICT has an impact on education of both patients and medical staff. There are many www sites aiming at prevention of civilization diseases (diabetes, hypertension, cardiac failure, cancer). They can support groups of patients suffering from the same disease (e.g. cancer patients). The effect of e-learning cannot be overestimated as far as medical education is concerned. There are many e-learning courses and videoconferences on variety of topics. The Medical Virtual Universities are established. The best model of learning for medical sciences is blended learning. It is a combination of traditional learning with e-learning. The contact with a real patient is a core of the learning process in medicine. The shift from medical services to prevention and health promotion can be observed. ICT applications in health care should adapt to the new situation.