The present-day digital health grew out of telemedicine developed for the provision of health services to patients in remote locations (e.g., seafarers, astronauts). The great potential of the digital and remote services was soon noticed, and technological developments followed, accelerating rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The easing of the pandemic is a moment for a reassessment and an interdisciplinary reflection on the progress in digital health. Several researchers addressed the barriers and facilitators for the adoption of digital health solutions. The research on AI developments in the processing of big clinical databases is featured in numerous scientific publications. However, the big data approach may have de-emphasised the research on individual care paths of patients. Therefore, it seems a priority to refocus again on patients’ individual paths and outcomes. This may entail more interdisciplinary research on the legal aspects of data privacy protection The telehealth services changed the degree of social presence in patient-provider interactions, and thus affected the social contract which was the pillar of therapeutic encounters. Many researchers are pointing in the direction of patient satisfaction as a key factor affecting the adoption of digital solutions [1]. Hence the next priority is the research on digital solutions and care management procedures that would improve patients’ acceptance and satisfaction. Considering the shortage of medical practitioners, also more research is needed on the integrated care systems and the involvement of more groups of medical and care specialists. The key groups of stakeholders’ shaping the landscape of digital health are venture capitalists, digital health companies, payers, and health care system providers or leaders. Their priorities and goals need to be aligned for the digital transformation to become fully adopted in health care systems [2]. The cross-sectional research involving various groups of stakeholders in digital health is yet another priority.

Evaluating patients’ experience and satisfaction often calls for analyses of free-text data. Language and domain-specific information extraction can reduce costly manual preprocessing and enable the analysis of extensive collections of experience-based narratives. The research aims were to (1) elicit free-text narratives about experiences with health services of international students in Poland, (2) develop domain- and language-specific algorithms for the extraction of information relevant for the evaluation of quality and safety of health services, and (3) test the performance of information extraction algorithms’ on questions about the patients’ experiences with health services. The materials were free-text narratives about health clinic encounters produced by English-speaking foreigners recalling their experiences (n = 104) in healthcare facilities in Poland. A linguistic analysis of the text collection led to constructing a semantic–syntactic lexicon and a set of lexical-syntactic frames. These were further used to develop rule-based information extraction algorithms in the form of Python scripts. The extraction algorithms generated text classifications according to predefined queries. In addition, the narratives were classified by human readers. The algorithm-based and the human readers’ classifications were highly correlated and significant (p < 0.01), indicating an excellent performance of the automatic query algorithms. The study results demonstrate that domain-specific and language-specific information extraction from free-text narratives can be used as an efficient and low-cost method for evaluating patient experiences and satisfaction with health services and built into software solutions for the quality evaluation in health care.

The progress in telemedicine can be observed globally and locally. Technological changes in telecommunications systems are intertwined with developments in telemedicine. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has expanded the potential of teleconsultations and telediagnosis solutions in all areas of medicine. This article presents: (1) an overview of milestones in the development of telecommunications systems that allow progress in telemedicine and (2) an analysis of the experiences of the last seven conferences of telemedicine and eHealth in Poland. The telemedicine and eHealth conferences have grown steadily in Poland since their inception in the late 1990s. An exemplary conference program content was used to assess the scientific maturity of the conference, measured by the indices of research dissemination and the impact of publications. The overview presents progress in selected areas of telemedicine, looking at local developments and broader changes. The growing interest in telemedicine in the world’s medical sciences is demonstrated by visibility metrics in Google Scholar, Pubmed, Scopus and Web of Science. National scientific events are assumed to raise interest in the population and influence the creation of general policies. As seen in the example of Poland, the activity of the scientific community gathered around the Polish Telemedicine Society led to novel legal acts that allowed the general practice of telemedicine during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Local scientific conferences focusing on telemedicine research can be a catalyst for changes in attitudes and regulations and the preparation of recommendations for the practice of telemedicine and electronic health. On the basis of the results of this study, it can be concluded that the progress in telemedicine cannot be analyzed in isolation from the ubiquitous developments in technology and telecommunications. More research is needed to assess the cumulative impact of long-standing scientific conferences in telemedicine, as exemplified by the telemedicine and eHealth conferences in Poland.