eHealth - an important factor in preventive care

Prevention has traditionally been one of the main pillars of healthcare, resulting from the sober recognition that many deaths and disabilities can be prevented. Beyond this traditional adherence to preventive healthcare, rising costs have put renewed pressure and urgency for purely economical reasons: it is, obviously, cheaper to care for people if they do not get sick in the first place.

According to studies, 1.2 million deaths in Europe are caused by smoking (The European Heart Network), 200.000 by alcohol (WHO 2006) and 10%-13% of all deaths in the EU are attributed to obesity (WHO); these deaths are, in essence, preventable by changes in lifestyle and nutrition. From a financial point of view, an estimated 90% of total healthcare costs in developed countries are attributed to preventable illness. Furthermore, preventive services have been shown repeatedly to be extremely efficient: as an example, smokers are much more likely to quit smoking if they receive advice on smoking cessation from their physicians.

Taking into account these astonishing figures, one has to wonder why more people don’t receive the preventive care services that could save so many lives and drastically reduce healthcare costs. According to several studies, the reasons are quite complex but one of the most important factors is the lack of mechanisms (or failure to appropriately use existing ones) to identify patients who need preventive services: the same study that identified the increased likelihood of smoking cessation due to advice from physicians, also concluded that physicians were unaware of the smoking status of roughly one third of their patients and provided advice to only half of those whom they knew to be smokers; that is, only one third of smokers received such advice.

In order to address these issues, the healthcare community is pushing for measures on two main fronts:

·         Delivering community education to high risk community groups, including advice about nutrition, physical activity and management of substance (tobacco, alcohol) abuse; and

·         Support and strengthen the healthcare workforce to help people in making healthy choices.

Based on the above, it should come as no surprise that a lot of emphasis is placed lately on how eHealth can help in these drives at a reasonable, if not outright low, cost. Indeed, eHealth is perfectly poised for the task at hand through already existing online application, such as:

·         Health information sites and online communities;

·         Decision support systems;

·         Disease management and other healthcare tools.

Moreover, sophisticated eHealth tools can further help reduce cost. A typical example is eMedication/ePrescribing applications: reportedly, 30.4% of unplanned hospital admissions in ages over 75 may be associated with medication mistakes, while 53% of these are considered “definitely preventable”. Since such medication mistakes often stem from the patient, reminder tools that help the elderly take their prescribed medication at the appropriate time can go a long way in alleviating such hospitalisations.

In general, eHealth systems can directly help saving lives and resources, as well as improve people’s health. Beyond the simple provision of information and decision support, eHealth can help avoid maternal deaths, enable elderly patients to receive timely reminders on their medication, increase awareness on community response to virus outbreaks, as well as remotely track these outbreaks. With preventive care being a leading social issue, strong evidence does suggest that there are opportunities to save money and improve quality through the effective use of ICT in healthcare.

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Nature of documentation: Article