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Gunther Eysenbach - the "virtual doctor" (Photo: STERN/Erol Gurian) |
We are entering the exciting millennium of „Cybermedicine" (W. Slack), „Teleprevention" (R. La Porte) and Consumer Health Informatics. New applications using computers are being developed which assist chronically ill patients at home, counsel healthy people to improve and adapt their health behavior, provide communities with an infrastructure to exchange data, to monitor and control diseases and to retrieve just-in-time information. Perhaps more than any other single development in curative medicine, the impact of these developments on Public Health are enormous and possibly even constitute a paradigm shift towards a new era of preventive medicine, giving consumers all information they need for self-responsible proactive health behavior. As the knowledge in medicine continues to grow exponentially, it is now time to bring this information filtered and in an intelligent way to consumers. IT and global health networks will bridge the knowledge gap between health providers and consumers, as they do between the developed and the developing world. Clearly, these perspectives are exciting, but new questions and problems will arise and new technologies need to be evaluated. Doctors will need to accept that they deal with knowledgeable informed patients who demand the best possible health care and who put their local health conditions into a global context. Doctors will inevitably have to be better trained in information technology to be able to keep pace with their patients, who will be increasingly better informed. New kinds of doctors, trained in both areas telecommunication and medicine, are needed, to act as facilitators to bring public health relevant medical knowledge to consumers using modern, flexible and intelligent information technology, who at the same time remain critic and vigil regarding this technology, and carefully evaluate these developments. |
Present Research Interests
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