Dr. Google: Physicians-The Web-Patients Triangle: Digital Skills and Attitudes towards e-Health Solutions among Physicians in South Eastern Poland-A Cross-Sectional Study in a Pre-COVID-19 Era.

The investment in digital e-health services is a priority direction in the development of global healthcare systems. While people are increasingly using the Web for health information, it is not entirely clear what physicians' attitudes are towards digital transformation, as well as the acceptance of new technologies in healthcare. The aim of this cross-sectional survey study was to investigate physicians' self-digital skills and their opinions on obtaining online health knowledge by patients, as well as the recognition of physicians' attitudes towards e-health solutions. Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to emerge the variables from self-designed questionnaire and cross-sectional analysis, comparing descriptive statistics and correlations for dependent variables using the one-way ANOVA (F-test). A total of 307 physicians participated in the study, reported as using the internet mainly several times a day (66.8%). Most participants (70.4%) were familiar with new technologies and rated their e-health literacy high, although 84.0% reported the need for additional training in this field and reported a need to introduce a larger number of subjects shaping digital skills (75.9%). 53.4% of physicians perceived Internet-sourced information as sometimes reliable and, in general, assessed the effects of its use by their patients negatively (41.7%). Digital skills increased significantly with frequency of internet use (F = 13.167; p = 0.0001) and decreased with physicians' age and the need for training. Those who claimed that patients often experienced health benefits from online health showed higher digital skills (-1.06). Physicians most often recommended their patients to obtain laboratory test results online (32.2%) and to arrange medical appointments via the Internet (27.0%). Along with the deterioration of physicians' digital skills, the recommendation of e-health solutions decreased (r = 0.413) and lowered the assessment of e-health solutions for the patient (r = 0.449). Physicians perceive digitization as a sign of the times and frequently use its tools in daily practice. The evaluation of Dr. Google's phenomenon and online health is directly related to their own e-health literacy skills, but there is still a need for practical training to deal with the digital revolution.

Adopting Assistive Technologies in Healthcare Processes: A Chatbot for Patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

The paper presents e-Health solutions for monitoring patients affected by Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Assistive technologies have a direct and positive impact on both the quality of life of patients and the overall management of the service. In the context of a wide project, we introduce an Ambient Assisted Living framework to investigate the adoption of telehealth and telemedicine applications in the healthcare process. First, we model the process of the hospital service where technological innovations have been applied. Second, we investigate the impact of a chatbot to improve the communications between operators and families. The chatbot obtained high adherence, compliance, and engagement of users. We provide evidence of how robust technological and organizational modelling can be successfully applied to support the staff of nutritionists staffs in ALS healthcare process. Furthermore, the solution discussed in this work provided a great impact during the COVID-19 emergency. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

U-Healthcare Solutions’ Acceptance for Adults

Most u-healthcare applications were developed based on five important dimensions: education, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of patients. The starting point of our research was the need of finding out the way in which the current COVID-19 pandemic influenced the dependency of chronic diseases’ persons over 50 to the M-health and E-health solutions in Romania. We focused on user’s experience and ability to use these systems, starting from the already known Smart-healthcare and U-healthcare ones, as developed in EU’s Horizon 2020 program and the way the new technologies like IoT, Smart Device, and Wearable Technologies as part of U-Healthcare are accepted and used in Romania. The focus group is made up of people aged 50 to 84, and the on-line questionnaire contained issues related to the acceptance of the IoT and the new technologies used in Telemedicine and U-healthcare systems for the prevention and monitoring of the chronic disease’s patients, starting from the influence UX factors. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.