E-health use is increasing worldwide, but no current e-health paradigm fulfills the complete range of user needs for online health services. This dilemma clouds a number of issues surrounding e-health, as promoters of e-commerce, personal health records, and consumer health informatics paradigms attempt to create encompassing e-health within the constraints of each unique perspective. In the long term, the most important of these issues may be the need to develop an e-health pedagogy that offers conceptual grounding and course curricula in order to effectively represent all facets of e-health. To address that issue, this article introduces a personal health informatics (PHI) paradigm that incorporates the best features of preceding paradigms by integrating informatics, personal, and healthcare perspectives. Drawing from PHI, a pedagogical framework is proposed to guide instruction in the design and development of encompassing e-health.
Digital Technology: Opportunities and barriers for usage of personal health records in hospital – report from a workshop of the Health Informatics Unit at the Royal College of Physicians