new characteristics of inequalities in the information society and ...

ISSN: 2247-6172;
ISSN-L: 2247-6172
Review of Applied Socio- Economic Research
(Volume 5, Issue 1/ 2013 ), pp. 47
URL: http://www.reaser.eu
e-mail: editors@reaser.eu
therapies (such as apply, in which patients, with what results). The difficulty is to reconcile the privacy of
patients and the availability of data for scientific use.
As a first step, the electronic medical records were closed systems within each institution. The next step
was to computerize communication between the health institution and third parties, as for example: between
the institution of health and pharmacy or between the institution of health and laboratories and diagnostic
examinations. That is, the computerized prescribing, medical report, communication between the doctor and
the patient.
In fact, there has been a gradual replacement of the manual for a prescription electronic procedure,
through which the doctor send medical orders directly to a computerized system. The electronic prescription
is a prescription perfectly legible and complete. Shamliyan, Duval, Du & Kane (2008) [4] found that the use
of electronic prescription of medicines, in the United States, is associated with a decrease of 66 percent of
the total number of errors in prescriptions for adults. The health benefits are indisputable. The savings
achieved can help fund the implementation of electronic prescribing systems.
When the electronic prescription is integrated into more complex information systems (for example, is
inserted in the hospital system or on a network of different healthcare providers), you can speed up the
implementation of doctor's order, directing the order directly to the recipient. The use of electronic
prescription for other services besides medication has the same advantages of speed and correction of the
request.
Despite the advantages, the introduction of electronic prescription is slow and more problematic than
expected (Aarts and Koppel, 2009) [5]. The most common difficulties are: little interoperability between
systems; the adoption of different systems for different suppliers, which discusses the adaptation of health
professionals; difficult to use and systems without enough support from their departments.
The electronic medical record is complemented with new forms of communication between doctor and
patient that allow new types of spatial organization of health services, by allowing the patient/patient contact
without that they are in the same physical space.
Electronic medical records, electronic prescription and new forms of communication between health
professionals and patients are already implemented hospital wide and inter-hospital, namely electronic
medical records, electronic prescribing, telemedicine. The next step will be the implementation of these tools
at transnational level, i.e. between different national health systems.
Telemedicine is pointed out as a solution for overcoming the distance issues between health actors.
Telemedicine is understood as "the distribution of health services in which the distance is a critical factor and
that health professionals use ICT for the exchange of information, for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention
of disease or injury, research and evaluation, as well as in continuing education in public health; all this in
the interest of the development of the health of the individual and their community "(WHO, 1998) [6]. An
essential tool for telemedicine is the video conferencing that enables consultation, even if the patient and the
doctor are not in the same physical space and allows you to assemble teams of health professionals from a
distance. Telemedicine can be complemented with the use of robots, by means of the remote control. That is,
a doctor may perform an intervention or examination with a device that controls remotely.
Literature shows that the specialties that use telemedicine the most are: pathology, surgery, emergency
and trauma and radiology. Also it shows that the majority of telemedicine projects link health professionals,
and only a few link professionals straight to patients (Salibaa et al., 2012) [7].
The new information and communication tools have great potential for integration of health services, but
certain conditions of implementation and operation have to be safeguarded, in particular the level of