eHealth

Abstract

Historically, digital development and emerging interactive technologies shaped a landscape in which health communication, disease prevention, accurate diagnosis, and symptoms management are at the tip of patients' fingers. eHealth, an umbrella term for using digital technologies and innovations in the healthcare sector, puts the patients at the core of the medical processes, offering a variety of tools for them to understand and cope with their conditions in a more active and informed way. The patient is directly involved in the rehabilitation process and the medical practitioner is assisted to give higher quality diagnoses and to maintain constant communication, using digital extensions (like avatars, Artificial Intelligence, robots, chatbots). This entry provides an overview of the meaning of eHealth in health communication and related fields. We highlight the distinction between eHealth, mHealth, iHealth, interactive health communication, health informatics, etc., and we present the principal theoretical and empirical direction of the eHealth research. The large‐scale adoption of technological innovation comes with benefits and advantages in terms of speed, accuracy, and personalization, but the risks and limitations of digital instruments should be analyzed, looking at the criticism of the concept and future research directions in legal, ethical, and psychosocial areas. It is crucial to understand the impact of eHealth on health communication and the shifting paradigm in the medical domain because developers, creators, health practitioners, and even policymakers and governments need to carefully design a context in which medical processes, clinicians, and new digital technologies can improve the lives of patients.