Digital Medicine: Health Care in the Internet Era Download for free books Digital Medicine: Health Care in the Internet Era for everyone book with Mediafire Link Download Link
Information technology has dramatically changed our lives in areas ranging from commerce and entertainment to voting. Now, policy advocates and government officials hope to bring the benefits of enhanced information technology to health care. Already, consumers can access a tremendous amount of medical information online. Some physicians encourage patients to use email or web messaging to manage simple medical issues. Increasingly, health care products can be purchased electronically.Yet the promise of e-health remains largely unfulfilled.
Digital Medicine investigates the factors limiting digital technology's ability to remake health care. It explores the political, social, and ethical challenges presented by online health care, as well as the impact that racial, ethnic, and other disparities are having on the e-health revolution. It examines the accessibility of health-related websites for different populations and asks how we can close access gaps and ensure the reliability and trustworthiness of the information presented online.
Darrell West and Edward Miller use multiple sources, including original survey research and website analysis, to study the content, sponsorship status, and public usage of health care-related websites, as well as the relationship between e-health utilization and attitudes about health care in the United States. They also explore the use of health information technology in other countries. The result is an important contribution to our understanding of health information innovation in America and around the world.
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I ran across this book while searching for something to use in a university seminar, Medicine and the Internet, and adopted the book as a primary source. Most of my students bought it from Amazon along with two other articles and a novel (see below).
Digital Medicine raises many of the important issues and offers quite a bit of interesting data about how doctors and other health care professionals and patients use the Web to find information and communicate. The book includes a data set the authors collected through a survey sponsored by the Brookings Institute. It also discusses other data, journal articles, and other sources. Most of this is good, reliable information.
The data is neutral, but the interpretation of the data is heavily weighted by the biases of those at the Brookings Institute. For example, they argue for government-run Web sites and strongly against Web sites that have commercial advertising, even though in many cited cases, these commercial sites have much better content and are more responsive to the needs of the readers. The book appears to be strongly biased toward a government-run health care system. There are good arguments for both sides of this debate, but Digital Medicine generally ignores the other side. Also, while the cost of health care is addressed, the book offers few practical solutions. Two Harvard Business Review articles (Herzlinger; Christensen, etal., also available on Amazon) balanced out this flaw for the class. Finally, there is no mention of tort reform or any discussion of the interests of legal stakeholders, a very serious omission in addressing cost (Grisham's, King of Torts was assigned, also available at Amazon).
Digital Medicine is not for casual pool-side reading, but for those interested in understanding how the future of health care might evolve, it is recommended as one important piece of the puzzle.
By Charles Jaeger