Background: Health IT adoption is high in Austria, but health IT targeted at the patient is still rare. Objectives: To analyse the shift from eHealth to ePatient and the role that patient portals may have in this shift, from an Austrian perspective. Methods: Analysis of the situation in Austria regarding the use of eHealth and patient portals. Results: While eHealth applications are broadly used in Austria, only few applications address the patient as user and aim at facilitating patient empowerment. Patient portals are one approach to foster patient empowerment. In Austria, a national patient portal is introduced at the moment, but only with limited functionalities. Systematic reviews show that the evidence on the impact of patient portals on patient empowerment is still unclear, which may explain low adoption rates. It seems to be still a long way to support a new generation of ePatients who are equipped, enabled, empowered and engaged in their health and health care decisions. Conclusion: Patient portals and other eHealth interventions aiming at fostering patient empowerment can only show impact when health care professionals are willing to engage in a true partnership with the patient, and when patients are willing to take over responsibility for their own health management.
- MeSH
- lidé MeSH
- portál pacienta * MeSH
- telemedicína metody organizace a řízení MeSH
- zapojení pacienta metody MeSH
- Check Tag
- lidé MeSH
- Geografické názvy
- Rakousko MeSH
After 20 years of working in the field of medical informatics, this paper summarizes career highlights, the state of education and research on health informatics in Austria as well as future prospects of the field. In 1981, the Austrian Working Group Medical Informatics was founded that now represents Austria within IMIA and EFMI. Austria has a good maturation of clinical IT and is now on the way to establish a comprehensive national eHealth infrastructure and a lifelong electronic health record (ELGA – Elektronische Krankenakte) to exchange patient-related data between health care institutions. Future prospects of health IT in Austria include patient-centred care across health care institutions, an increasing demand for health informatics experts with various backgrounds, secondary use of clinical data and health IT to support patient empowerment.
- MeSH
- elektronické zdravotní záznamy MeSH
- lékařská informatika * dějiny metody výchova MeSH
- portál pacienta MeSH
- telemedicína metody MeSH
- využití lékařské informatiky MeSH
- Publikační typ
- autobiografie MeSH
- Geografické názvy
- Rakousko MeSH
