Using eHealth: where information technology and health care meet.

• Author: Held, Shari
• Position: HEALTH CARE

TECHNOLOGY IMPACTS every part of our lives today. We do our banking online. We pay our bills on the Internet. We do our shopping on the Internet. But perhaps nowhere is technology more helpful and visible than the Internet's increasingly powerful role in health care.

Wikipedia defines eHealth (or e-health) as "a relatively recent term for health-care practice which is supported by electronic processes and communication." That definition encompass a large range of services at the cutting edge of medicine/healthcare and information technology Here is a look at some electronic offerings and how they work to improve the health of Hoosiers.

Sharing health information. "The delivery of community healthcare is a very complex enterprise which involvesall kinds of data," says Dr. Greg Larkin, chief medical officer for Indiana Health Information Exchange. "Without the utilization of information technology, the data becomes less valuable and often is lost."

The Indianapolis-based non-profit's DOCS4DOCS[R] clinical messaging service has delivered electronic lab and test results to central Indiana physicians and hospitals for several years. During that time, IHIE has received national recognition for its achievements. Now the organization is poised to take its model nationwide. IHIE's latest product is a disease-management service, Quality Health First. Initially, this service will report how physicians are performing (compared to their peers) in specific categories. Incentives for physicians will be tied to the program. Eventually IHIE plans to make Quality Health First available to the public so they can use the data to determine which physician or facility to go to for health care.

"DOCS4DOCS ... improves the efficiency of the flow of the information, but the biggest return for health information technology and its applications is not simply the efficiency of capturing and delivery information into doctors offices, but improving chronic disease management," Larkin says. "If you can impact the cost of chronic diseases, you will significantly lower the health-care costs of the community It's chronic diseases that cost us the most and it is where one of the biggest opportunities is lost. By the application of the capabilities of the IHIE we are now able to start assembling and making some real sense out of all the information that is out there."

Internet-based medical information. Thanks to the abundance of databases of medical research and easy access...