E-Health at Home: Legal, Privacy and Security Aspects

Background

E-Health is an emerging field, which arises from the intersection of health informatics and communications. E-Health refers to the use of modern information and communication technologies to meet the needs of citizens, patients, healthcare professionals, healthcare providers, and policy makers (“Ministerial Declaration,” 2003). In a broader sense, the term includes not only technical development and new business models, but also a change in our way of thinking, and the compromise of enhancing health both locally and in the widest possible scope by means of information and communications technologies (Eysenbach, 2001). Regarding these considerations a huge amount of medical data is generated, stored, treated... and the medical traditional law must be adapted to this new situation.

E-Health services are being offered more and more outside the traditional clinical environment. As it is shown in Figure 1, the main reasons for this fact are a better quality of life, primarily for patients with a chronic condition, and the need to reduce costs when providing health services for the elderly. Very old people (aged over 80) are the fastest growing population group and this puts the health systems — the way they are designed today — under a strong pressure. Little by little this shift is placing patients’ homes as the centre of the E-Health service provision.

Figure 1.

Evolution of E-health services provision