KM can be a tremendous factor in developing the infrastructure and outcome of e-health.
The other e’s represent the e-health are efficiency, enhancing quality, evidence based, empowerment, education, extending, ethics, & equity.
Patients play a significant role in putting more pressure on physicians to use timely evidence by accessing online information. It seems to the first time in the history of medicine that consumers have equal access to knowledge bases of medicine.
Challenges:
- Meaningful collaboration with patients
- Preparation for upcoming technological development
- Efficient strategies to monitor patterns of Internet use among consumers
- Balance between connectivity and privacy factors
- Better understanding of the balance between real and virtual interactions
- Equitable access to technology and information across the globe.
Three important issues must be carefully considered in the field of e-health:
1- e-Procurement: addresses organizations adaptation to the internet-based tools to manage medical supplies. It includes the usage of standardized and universal numbering system, and the move toward an online business platform for the data interchange.
2- e-Connectivity: Many of the functions associated with claims submission sand payment are repetitive tasks that are more efficiently done by computers. The most expensive are the tasks surrounding the claims process, such as eligibility checks and referrals.
3- e-Benefits: One of the primary drivers of the e-benefits is the possibility of self-service tools through which employees can customized their own insurance plans and have ready access to them. Once the insurance information is made easily available to employees, they become more responsible about their benefits.
Drawbacks of e-Health
- The tension between access and quality assurance.
- Lack of physicality
- Depersonalization
- Multipoint entry into the delivery system makes continuity difficult to achieve
- Privacy concerns
Benefits of e-Health
- Highly efficient national medical markets
- Around the clock service
- Seamless integration of products and services
- The ability to heavily personalize computer-mediated relationships
Incorporating KM in e-Health: it can only reveal the full value of e-health.
- The KM can help make the web a more useful tool for patient education.
- The KM will provide the way to achieve good quality of health care. KM enhances reliability, accessibility and completeness of information.
- KM can improve the way in which the data is shown to customer online and thus increase customer satisfaction.
- KW will help communication be more effective, so it would help making e-health better and the faster.
