eHealth Solutions for Healthcare Disparities

Paralleling emerging trends in cyber-health technology, concerns are mounting about racial, ethnic, disparities in health care utilization and outcomes. eHealth Solutions for Health Care Disparities brings these currents together, challenging readers to use, promote, and develop new technology-based methods for closing these gaps. Edited by a leading urban health advocate and featuring 16 expert contributors, the book examines cyber-strategies with the greatest potential toward effective, equitable care, improved service delivery and better health outcomes for all.

Chapters go well beyond the possibilities of the Electronic Medical Record to discuss emerging roles for information technology in promoting healthful behavior changes (e.g., nutrition, weight loss, smoking cessation), disease prevention (e.g., cancer, HIV), and healthcare utilization, patient education and medicine compliance). The rise of e-Patients and the transformation of the doctor-patient relationship are also discussed. Opportunities for Web based products and interventions are explored in terms of tracking disparities, improving healthcare utilization and health outcomes, reducing disparities and monitoring trends among patients, whether they have Internet capabilities or not.

• Internet
• Public Health
• disease prevention
• e-health
• electronic medical record
• health equity
• health informatics
• health information technology
• internet & health
• medical informatics
• prevention
• telemedicine

From the reviews:

"This book addresses two important subjects in healthcare: health disparities and electronic technologies. … The intended audience includes public health professionals, healthcare administrators, informaticians, and graduate students. … it appears to me the audience is primarily researchers in the field of health disparities and electronic health technologies. … This book provides a valuable literature review of health disparities in the U.S. and of the role of the Internet and other electronic technologies in healthcare." (Florin Oprescu, Doody's Review Service, February, 2008)

"The book is organized into 4 sections. … This book may potentially assist policy makers in promoting new policy direction. … This book seems suited for graduate students who will question, challenge, and expand on the formulated concepts and solutions. … It also may offer legislators and scholars of healthy policy ‘fresh’ thoughts on the direction that may assist in closing the gap of health disparities." (Stanley W. Borg, Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 299 (8), 2008)

"In [this book the editor] sets out to marry the “unlikely bedfellows” of the sociobehavioral scientist, knowledgeable about healthcare disparities and the health information technologist. This thoroughly referenced primer accomplishes this task and more. Although written with public health professionals, policy makers and academicians in mind, this book also offers great value to the practicing physician." (Dina D. Strachan, MD, Journal of the National Medical Association, Vol. 100 (10), 2008)

• Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute (UHI), Baltimore, USA

  Michael Christopher Gibbons

Michael Christopher Gibbons is Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute and Assistant Professor of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was recently elected President of the International Society for Urban Health.

One of Gibbons’s research interests is the development of effective health interventions to reduce health disparities. He is the founding director of the Center for Community Health Education, Advocacy and Leadership Training at Hopkins (HEALTH), is a member of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions, and was named a Health Disparities Scholar by the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health.

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