Health

Improved health and poverty reduction go hand in hand, not least since good health is a prerequisite for better living conditions. Hence, three out of eight Millennium Development Goals are related to health issues. There is an urgent need to improve child and maternal health, and combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases. ICT can extend health education, transfer advice on treatment, and bring help where health personnel are out of reach. Smart combinations of ICT can be used to improve planning and delivery of health services, as well as awareness raising and preventive measures, not least through edutainment efforts that combined different media and communication technologies in innovative ways. All in all, both the health sector at large as well as individual citizens can benefit from improved information and communication, thus strengthening the right to development through better health.

The benefits of ICT for health can be seen through these specific areas:

Healthcare management is about increasing efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare delivery. ICT is of crucial importance in implementing information health systems at institutional levels. Establishing electronic patient records provides easy sharing of medical history among health personnel and patient- centered service. On line scheduling and delivery of test and lab results saves time to both patients and administrative personnel. More efficient organization of resources and care provision at all levels can be achieved through ICT, not least mobile applications, thus leading towards greater productivity and service delivery.

e-Health is about different ways using ICT to empower patients and citizens with healthcare services. Providing online health information and interactive advisory support for different groups of patients, organizing doctor-patient remote sessions or on-site remote training in the case of emergency, are all examples where ICT has a crucial role. Knowledge search and exchange in the area of health care is yet another facet of e-health. ICT enables remote doctor-doctor consultation as well as real time instructions and treatment via telemedicine. In addition, it enables electronic publishing of novel techniques in medicine, access to catalogues of drugs and vaccines, searches in medical databases, and development of expert systems that can help with diagnosis and treatment, as well as increased and free access to health and medical information for patients.

Public health services can make use of ICT for automated data collection necessary for creating heath status databases and identifying possible health threats. These can in turn help develop policies and strategies regarding health issues. In addition, drugs registries can be created to keep control of costs and utilization. ICT can be used to connect these registries to the prescriptions and patient records in order to improve monitoring of drug use, effectiveness of prescribed medicines, and eventual side effects. The technology can empower professional development and education in health science through creation of educational databases of e-learning courses or instructional modules related to preventing and fighting diseases.