An Evaluation of E-Learning in Healthcare

As new technologies enable a radical transformation of the learning process, new learning approaches and techniques appear, and the need for quality assurance of all learning assets emerges. Although, the existing e-learning standards have managed to cover most of the different aspects of the e-learning process, the shift to new paradigms such as collaborative and community learning sets the need for new standards. The main goal of e-learning standards is to enable and ensure interoperability and re-usability of solutions, systems, objects and processes. E-learning is an extremely useful tool for the healthcare community since it allows professionals, researchers, companies and individuals to improve their skills and expand their knowledge. However, it has faced several difficulties mainly due to the heterogeneity of educational needs. The different user groups have different requirements from e-learning, different availability and resources and consequently different quality standards. In this chapter, the authors emphasize on the quality assurance, and the community aspect of e-learning.

Telepaediatrics in Queensland

Telemedicine has been shown to be an effective alternative technique to provide health services to rural and remote communities. Although the interest in telemedicine is growing, there is little evidence to show the quality and reliability of telemedicine techniques. This chapter describes the telepaediatric service in Queensland, Australia outlining some evidence for quality, reliability and sustainability.

Standards in Telemedicine

For many years, medical teams working on telemedicine have made a strong effort to define the telemedicine Body of Knowledge (BoK), and generate compatible standards that allow delivering telemedicine with adequate medical quality. The authors expect, after the European Commission statement on the Prague 2009 declaration, a new era for telemedicine. The essential barriers, which have already been encountered, include Literacy, Standard connectivity and Quality control. In the present chapter, the authors will address the item of Literacy regarding the type of standards in each of the topics of the Telemedicine Body of Knowledge.

E-Health

People-centered health care represents a structural change in thinking, which encapsulates before anything else the consideration of the patient. The development of people-centered care might include a partnership approach based on equal footing, capacity-building and the expansion of organizational care. Its central values encompass empowerment, participation, family, community, and the abolition of any kind of discrimination. As a result, they bestow people on shared decision-making not exclusively on issues of treatment but also for health care organization. On the other hand, a global e-health agreement is beginning to take shape on the engagement of stakeholders, the interoperability, and standards. Consequently, e-health can have a significant impact on people-centered care, despite the challenges of implementation and adoption.

E-Health Communities for Learning Healthy Habits

There are e-health communities of many different kinds available on the Internet today. Some e-health communities are for people who need to change their established bad, or unhealthy, habits such as the ones for people suffering from overweight or smoking. To develop and maintain a healthier life-style is not an easy task to succeed with, it involves being able to change everyday situations. E-health communities can assist in this process through continuous interactions between community members. However, whether these e-health communities actively support learning depends on the ways they help community members reflect upon their habits, underlying reasons and motivational factors. In this chapter, the author presents a framework for how to evaluate these e-health communities from a learning perspective. The framework covers different types of conversation topics, ways to respond and community knowledge.

Quality Issues in Personalized E-Health, Mobile Health and E-Health Grids

The electronic healthcare in the modern society has the possibility of converting the practice of delivery of health care. Currently, chaos of information is characterizing the public health care, which leads to inferior decision-making, increasing expenses and even loss of lives. Technological progress in the sensors, integrated circuits, and the wireless communications have allowed designing low cost, microscopic, light, and smart sensors. These smart sensors are able to feel, transport one or more vital signals, and they can be incorporated in wireless personal or body networks for remote health monitoring. Sensor networks promise to drive innovation in health care allowing cheap, continuous, mobile and personalized health management of electronic health records with the Internet. The e-health applications imply an exciting set of requirements for Grid middleware and provide a rigorous testing ground for Grid. In the chapter, the authors present an overview of the current technological achievements in the electronic healthcare world combined with an outline of the quality dimensions in healthcare.

Standards and Guidelines Development in the American Telemedicine Association

The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) was established in 1993 to promote access to medical care for consumers and health professionals via telecommunications technology. The ATA Standards and Guidelines Committee has been charged by the Board of Directors with identifying, overseeing, and assisting work groups to develop individual standards and guidelines for specific technical, clinical and administrative areas. This chapter will review the mission of the ATA Standards and Guidelines Committee, the process by which standards and guidelines documents are produced, and report on its progress to date in providing the telehealth community with standards and guidelines for the practicing medicine at a distance.

Measuring Safety of Care

Patient safety initiatives have been launched in a number of countries, mostly focusing on problem identification, learning and improvement. However, so far there has been little focus on monitoring outcomes and surveillance of development of patient safety at the organizational and system level. As a consequence, we still do not know the extent of adverse incidents or patient safety problems, just as we do not know whether the measures introduced have in fact led to improvement. The perspectives of implementing use of e.g. indicators, audits and questionnaires for systematic risk management is, that it will be possible to continuously estimate the prevalence and incidence of patient safety quality problems. The lesson learned in quality improvement is that it will pay back in terms of improvement in patient safety. For this purpose validated methods are needed.

An Information Technology Architecture for Drug Effectiveness Reporting and Post-Marketing Surveillance

Adverse drug events impose a large cost on the society in terms of lives and healthcare costs. In this chapter, the authors propose an information technology architecture for enabling the monitoring of adverse drug events in an outpatient setting as a part of the post marketing surveillance program. The proposed system architecture enables the development of a web based drug effectiveness reporting and monitoring system that builds on previous studies demonstrating the feasibility of a system in which community pharmacists identify and report adverse drug events. The authors define the key technical requirements of such a monitoring and reporting system, identify the critical factors that influence the successful implementation and use of the system, and propose information technology solutions that satisfy these requirements.