ABSTRACT
eHealth is the use of modern information and communication technology (ICT) for trans-institutional healthcare purposes. Important subtopics of eHealth are health data sharing and telemedicine. Most of the clinical documentation to be shared is collected in patient records to support patient care. More sophisticated approaches to electronic patient records are trans-institutional or (inter-)national. Other aims for clinical documentation are quality management, reimbursement, legal issues, and medical research. Basic prerequisite for eHealth is interoperability, which can be divided into technical, semantic and process interoperability. There is a variety of international standards to support interoperability. Telemedicine is a subtopic of eHealth, which bridges spatial distance by using ICT for medical (inter-)actions. We distinguish telemedicine among healthcare professionals and telemedicine between health care professionals and patients. Both have a great potential to face the challenges of aging societies, the increasing number of chronically ill patients, multimorbidity and low number of physicians in remote areas. With ongoing digitalization more and more data are available digitally. Clinical documentation is an important source for big data analysis and artificial intelligence. The patient has an important role: Telemonitoring, wearable technologies, and smart home devices provide digital health data from daily life. These are high-quality data which can be used for medical decisions.
