Ivanitskaya Lana V, Zikos Dimitrios, Erzikova Elina
Health Administration Division, School of Health Sciences, The Herbert H and Grace A Dow College of Health Professions, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, United States.
Department of Healthcare Management and Leadership, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock, TX, United States.
J Med Internet Res. 2025 Jun 16;27:e60071. doi: 10.2196/60071.
BACKGROUND: Fueled by innovations in technology and health interventions to promote, restore, and maintain health and safeguard well-being, the field of eHealth has yielded significant scholarly output over the past 25 years. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to offer a big picture of research developments and multidisciplinary contributions to eHealth that shaped this field up to 2024. To that end, we analyze evidence from 3 corpora: 10,022 OpenAlex documents with eHealth in the title, the 5000 most relevant eHealth articles according to the Web of Science (WoS) algorithm, and all available (n=1885) WoS eHealth reviews. METHODS: Using VOSviewer, we built co-occurrence networks for WoS keywords and OpenAlex concepts. We examined clusters, categorized terminology, and added custom overlays about eHealth technologies, stakeholders, and objectives. A cocitation map of sources referenced in WoS reviews helped identify scientific fields supporting eHealth. After synthesizing eHealth terminology, we proceeded to build a conceptual model of eHealth scholarship grounded in bibliometric evidence. RESULTS: Several research directions emerged from bibliometric networks: eHealth studies on self-management and interventions, especially in mental health; telemedicine, telehealth, and technology acceptance; privacy, security, and design concerns; health information consumers' literacy; health promotion and prevention; mHealth and digital health; and HIV prevention. Conducted at the individual, health system, community, and society levels, eHealth studies focused on health and wellness across the human lifespan. Keywords such as internet (mean publication year 2017), telemedicine (2018), telehealth (2018), mHealth (2019), mobile health (2020), and digital health (2021) were strongly linked to literature indexed with eHealth (2019). Different types of eHealth apps were supported by research on infrastructures: networks, data exchange, computing technologies, information systems, and platforms. Researchers' concerns for eHealth data security and privacy, including advanced access control and encryption methods, featured prominently in the maps, along with terminology related to health analytics. Review authors cited a wide range of medical sources and journals specific to eHealth technologies, as well as journals in psychology, psychiatry, public health, policy, education, health communication, and other fields. The Journal of Medical Internet Research stood out as the most cited source. The concept map showed a prominent role of political science and law, economics, nursing, business, and knowledge management. Our empirically derived conceptual model of eHealth scholarship incorporated commonly researched stakeholder groups, eHealth application types, supporting infrastructure, health analytics concepts, and outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Drawing upon contributions from many disciplines, the field of eHealth has evolved from early studies of internet-enabled communications, telemedicine, and telehealth to research on mobile health and emerging digital health technologies serving diverse stakeholders. Digital health has become a popular alternative term to eHealth. We offered practical implications and recommendations on future research directions, as well as guidance on study design and publication.
背景:在促进、恢复和维护健康以及保障福祉的技术创新和健康干预措施的推动下,电子健康领域在过去25年中产生了大量学术成果。 目的:本研究旨在全面呈现截至2024年塑造该领域的电子健康研究发展及多学科贡献。为此,我们分析了三个语料库的证据:标题中包含“电子健康”的10022篇OpenAlex文档、根据科学网(WoS)算法筛选出的5000篇最相关的电子健康文章,以及所有可用的(n = 1885)WoS电子健康综述。 方法:使用VOSviewer,我们构建了WoS关键词和OpenAlex概念的共现网络。我们检查了聚类、对术语进行分类,并添加了关于电子健康技术、利益相关者和目标的自定义叠加层。WoS综述中引用来源的共被引图谱有助于识别支持电子健康的科学领域。在综合电子健康术语后,我们基于文献计量证据构建了电子健康学术的概念模型。 结果:文献计量网络中出现了几个研究方向:关于自我管理和干预的电子健康研究,尤其是在心理健康方面;远程医疗、远程健康和技术接受度;隐私、安全和设计问题;健康信息消费者素养;健康促进和预防;移动健康和数字健康;以及艾滋病毒预防。电子健康研究在个人、卫生系统、社区和社会层面开展,关注人类整个生命周期的健康和福祉。诸如互联网(平均出版年份2017年)、远程医疗(2018年)、远程健康(2018年)、移动健康(2019年)、移动医疗(2020年)和数字健康(2021年)等关键词与以电子健康索引的文献(2019年)紧密相连。不同类型的电子健康应用得到了关于基础设施的研究支持:网络、数据交换、计算技术、信息系统和平台。研究人员对电子健康数据安全和隐私的关注,包括先进的访问控制和加密方法,在图谱中显著突出,还有与健康分析相关的术语。综述作者引用了广泛的医学来源以及特定于电子健康技术的期刊,以及心理学、精神病学、公共卫生、政策、教育、健康传播和其他领域的期刊。《医学互联网研究杂志》是被引用最多的来源。概念图谱显示政治学和法律、经济学、护理学、商业和知识管理发挥了突出作用。我们通过实证得出的电子健康学术概念模型纳入了常见的研究利益相关者群体、电子健康应用类型、支持基础设施、健康分析概念和成果。 结论:借助多学科的贡献,电子健康领域已从早期对互联网通信、远程医疗和远程健康的研究发展到对服务于不同利益相关者的移动健康和新兴数字健康技术的研究。数字健康已成为电子健康的一个流行替代术语。我们对未来研究方向提出了实际意义和建议,以及关于研究设计和发表的指导。
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