Open access
THE USE OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES IN HEALTHCARE
Ewa M. KWIATKOWSKA1
Informalization and Digitalization of Economies and Societies – General and Practical Issues
Publication language: English
Journal article
Transformations No. 3-4 (98-99) 2018, Publication date: 7 December 2018
Keywords: healthcare, EMR, Internet, patient, telemedicine
Abstract Information and communication technologies (ICT) aimed at improving the standard of the healthcare services are defined as e-health. Introduction of an e-health should improve the quality and access to healthcare services. At the same time sector effectiveness should increase. The use of ICT in this sector is a necessity in view of demographic trends and the rise in healthcare spending. The purpose of the research is an analysis of ICT usage in the healthcare in Poland, and a description of differences in the ICT implementation between Poland and other countries. The pace of ICT implementation in healthcare is unlikely to be sufficient. Care providers are not prepared to exchange patients’ data online, because of lack of compatibility of software for electronic medical records processing. The ICT solutions are only fragmentarily implemented, but even these experiences show the impact of ICT solutions on the healthcare costs reduction. The effective functioning of e-health strictly depends on medical data processing systems interoperability. The use of ICT should provide changes in the approach towards the patient and increase the efficiency, including medical errors decrease and hospitalization time shortening.
Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland
E-mail: ewcia@kozminski.edu.pl