2nd IEEE International Workshop on Consumer eHealth Platforms, Services and Applications (CeHPSA), Las Vegas, Vereinigte Staaten

Healthcare globally is going through a major transition that promises to provide the unprecedented delivery of services in new and novel ways&#046; Medical infrastructures, built on advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), aim to fully distribute services in a much more flexible way&#046; This will enable the seamless flow of information within and amongst medical facilities, practitioners and service users&#046; ICT will ensure that services are highly available and provide enriched information&#046; Multiple modes of interaction will be possible and this will all happen regardless of a user’s location or the devices they use&#046; This vision is commonly referred to as eHealth and is one of the most rapidly growing areas in health today with an estimated annual budget of Euros 17&#046;4 billion in Europe and $36 billion in the US&#046;<br>The drive towards this growth in interest can be directly attributed to the fact that healthcare is becoming increasingly more difficult to sustain because of the rising costs associated with people living longer and an increase in diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and dementia&#046; This presents a unique opportunity to develop new and novel platforms services and applications that exploit information within and across the healthcare sector to significantly improve the quality of patient care and improve and execute clinical processes more efficiently&#046; This will help to form a closer relationship between healthcare providers and service users and fundamentally help support people in their daily lives&#046; Furthermore, it addresses the growing problem of healthcare seclusion amongst rural areas and low&#8211;income nations where they too, through eHealth, can benefit from life&#8211;critical information, help, support and training&#046; All this has the ability to empower people and encourage personal consumer healthcare beyond what is currently possible&#046;<br>Nonetheless, due to the potential criticality of healthcare and the complex coordination and delivery of healthcare services it is not surprising that we have not seen widespread adoption of ICT in health&#046; Yet eHealth presents a unique and high impacting application of ICT&#046; The healthcare domain is sensitive to change and this will require new processes, methodologies and tools and this comes at a time where sustainable health is becoming increasingly more difficult&#046;