Three Examples of Success in Personal Internet Support and Telecare: Consumer-centric Highlights of a Systematic Review of e-Health

The Ministry of Health has commissioned the National Institute for Health Innovation (NIHI) to carry out a systematic literature review about the implementation of eHealth technologies. This review identified 100 articles published between 2003 and early 2009 providing systematically measured benefits from implementations. This paper describes three of the most outstanding examples of success in consumer Internet support and telecare from amongst the review findings. These interventions – involving asthma, Type I diabetes and heart disease – invite us to consider the potential, and the necessary pathways, to reaslise such benefits on a larger scale. 1. Background and Methods What Information Technology (IT) innovations have been rigorously demonstrated to provide benefits in health care? New Zealand’s Ministry of Health has commissioned the National Institute for Health Innovation (NIHI) to carry out a systematic literature review to address just this question [1]. The review examined 1413 articles retrieved from database queries on MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CINAHL and Business Source Premier for articles appearing between 2003 and early 2009. Of these, 100 articles met the inclusion criteria for providing systematically measured benefits from implementations of relevant eHealth technologies (where ‘relevant ’ involved a variety of criteria to focus o