Access to eHealth language-based services for multinational patients

Abstract

In more and more countries the number of citizens with double nationality is growing substantially. In their developing stage, current eHealth technologies are oriented towards helping the native patients rather than those speaking a foreign language that limits an access to the medical care. Nowadays, most people search the web for the medical symptoms of their disorders before going to the General Practitioner (GP), however multinational patients have limited chance to access eHealth care services not only owning to the lack of medical knowledge, but specifically due to their language barriers. In this study we investigate eHealth services on multilingual information access and online communication gap between the patients and the nurses or healthcare professionals.