Gunther Eysenbach

Last updated
Gunther Eysenbach
Gunther Eysenbach.jpg
Eysenbach in 2009
Born (1967-03-22) 22 March 1967 (age 57)
Known for EHealth, Consumer health informatics infodemiology open access,JMIR Publications,Journal of Medical Internet Research
Awards
  • Public Knowledge Project Community Contribution Award
  • Ferguson Distinguished Achievement Awards
Scientific career
Fields Healthcare.
Institutions
  • University of Heidelberg
  • University of Toronto
  • University Health Network
  • Digital Health and Science Ventures
  • JMIR Publications
  • University of Victoria

Gunther Eysenbach is a German-Canadian researcher on healthcare, especially health policy, eHealth, and consumer health informatics.

Contents

Career

Eysenbach was born on 22 March 1967[ citation needed ] in West Berlin, West Germany. While a medical student, he served on the executive board as elected communication director, later as vice-president of the European Medical Students' Association. [1] He received an M.D. from the University of Freiburg and a Master of Public Health from Harvard School of Public Health. From 1999 to 2002 he founded and headed a research unit on cybermedicine and ehealth at the University of Heidelberg [ citation needed ] and organized and chaired the World Congress on Internet in Medicine. [2] In March 2002, he emigrated to Canada [ citation needed ] and since then has been senior scientist at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation [3] at the University Health Network [ citation needed ] (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), and associate professor in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto.[ citation needed ]

Eysenbach works in the field of consumer health informatics. He has written several books and articles, and organizes conferences. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Internet Research . From 2000 to 2008, he served as working group chair for the WG Consumer Health Informatics of the International Medical Informatics Association. [4]

Other contributions include:

Books written or edited

See also

Related Research Articles

In a support group, members provide each other with various types of help, usually nonprofessional and nonmaterial, for a particular shared, usually burdensome, characteristic. Members with the same issues can come together for sharing coping strategies, to feel more empowered and for a sense of community. The help may take the form of providing and evaluating relevant information, relating personal experiences, listening to and accepting others' experiences, providing sympathetic understanding and establishing social networks. A support group may also work to inform the public or engage in advocacy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Health On the Net Foundation</span> Nonprofit organization that certifies online medical information

Health On the Net Foundation (HON) was a Swiss not-for-profit organization based in Geneva which promoted a code of conduct for websites providing health information and offered certificates to those in compliance.

eHealth describes healthcare services which are supported by digital processes, communication or technology such as electronic prescribing, Telehealth, or Electronic Health Records (EHRs). The use of electronic processes in healthcare dated back to at least the 1990s. Usage of the term varies as it covers not just "Internet medicine" as it was conceived during that time, but also "virtually everything related to computers and medicine". A study in 2005 found 51 unique definitions. Some argue that it is interchangeable with health informatics with a broad definition covering electronic/digital processes in health while others use it in the narrower sense of healthcare practice using the Internet. It can also include health applications and links on mobile phones, referred to as mHealth or m-Health. Key components of eHealth include electronic health records (EHRs), telemedicine, health information exchange, mobile health applications, wearable devices, and online health information. These technologies enable healthcare providers, patients, and other stakeholders to access, manage, and exchange health information more effectively, leading to improved communication, decision-making, and overall healthcare outcomes.

James Edgar Till is a University of Toronto biophysicist, best known for demonstrating – with Ernest McCulloch – the existence of stem cells.

A personal health record (PHR) is a health record where health data and other information related to the care of a patient is maintained by the patient. This stands in contrast to the more widely used electronic medical record, which is operated by institutions and contains data entered by clinicians to support insurance claims. The intention of a PHR is to provide a complete and accurate summary of an individual's medical history which is accessible online. The health data on a PHR might include patient-reported outcome data, lab results, and data from devices such as wireless electronic weighing scales or from a smartphone.

Public health surveillance is, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), "the continuous, systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health-related data needed for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of public health practice." Public health surveillance may be used to track emerging health-related issues at an early stage and find active solutions in a timely manner. Surveillance systems are generally called upon to provide information regarding when and where health problems are occurring and who is affected.

Thomas William "Tom" Ferguson was an American medical doctor, educator, and author. He was an early advocate for patient empowerment, urging patients to educate themselves, to assume control of their own health care, and to use the Internet as a way of accomplishing those goals.

WebCite is an intermittently available archive site, originally designed to digitally preserve scientific and educationally important material on the web by taking snapshots of Internet contents as they existed at the time when a blogger or a scholar cited or quoted from it. The preservation service enabled verifiability of claims supported by the cited sources even when the original web pages are being revised, removed, or disappear for other reasons, an effect known as link rot.

An e-patient is a health consumer who participates fully in their own medical care, primarily by gathering information about medical conditions that impact them and their families, using the Internet and other digital tools. The term encompasses those who seek guidance for their own ailments, and the friends and family members who research on their behalf. E-patients report two effects of their health research: "better health information and services, and different, but not always better, relationships with their doctors."

The Journal of Medical Internet Research is a peer-reviewed open-access medical journal established in 1999 covering eHealth and "healthcare in the Internet age". The editors-in-chief are Gunther Eysenbach and Rita Kukafka. The publisher is JMIR Publications.

Online health communities are online social networks related to health. They primarily provide a means for patients and their families to learn about illnesses, to seek and offer social support, and to connect with others in similar circumstances. These online groups can be composed of individuals with illnesses, groups of medical professionals with shared interests, non-professional caregivers and family of patients, or a combination. The term "online health community" is primarily academic jargon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Health 2.0</span>

"Health 2.0" is a term introduced in the mid-2000s, as the subset of health care technologies mirroring the wider Web 2.0 movement. It has been defined variously as including social media, user-generated content, and cloud-based and mobile technologies. Some Health 2.0 proponents see these technologies as empowering patients to have greater control over their own health care and diminishing medical paternalism. Critics of the technologies have expressed concerns about possible misinformation and violations of patient privacy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association</span> Industry association in scholarly publishing

The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include matters pertaining to open access books and open scholarly infrastructure.

Health 3.0 is a health-related extension of the concept of Web 3.0 whereby the users' interface with the data and information available on the web is personalized to optimize their experience. This is based on the concept of the Semantic Web, wherein websites' data is accessible for sorting in order to tailor the presentation of information based on user preferences. Health 3.0 will use such data access to enable individuals to better retrieve and contribute to personalized health-related information within networked electronic health records, and social networking resources.

Infoveillance is a type of syndromic surveillance that specifically utilizes information found online. The term, along with the term infodemiology, was coined by Gunther Eysenbach to describe research that uses online information to gather information about human behavior.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Health information on Wikipedia</span>

The Wikipedia online encyclopedia has, since the late 2000s, served as a popular source for health information for both laypersons and, in many cases, health care practitioners. Health-related articles on Wikipedia are popularly accessed as results from search engines, which frequently deliver links to Wikipedia articles. Independent assessments have been made of the number and demographics of people who seek health information on Wikipedia, the scope of health information on Wikipedia, and the quality and reliability of the information on Wikipedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Health information on the Internet</span>

Health information on the Internet refers to all health-related information communicated through or available on the Internet.

Infodemiology was defined by Gunther Eysenbach in the early 2000s as information epidemiology. It is an area of science research focused on scanning the internet for user-contributed health-related content, with the ultimate goal of improving public health. Later, it is also defined as the science of mitigating public health problems resulting from an infodemic.

Participatory surveillance is community-based monitoring of other individuals. This term can be applied to both digital media studies and ecological field studies. In the realm of media studies, it refers to how users surveil each other using the internet. Either through the use of social media, search engines, and other web-based methods of tracking, an individual has the power to find information both freely or non freely given about the individual being searched. Issues of privacy emerge within this sphere of participatory surveillance, predominantly focused on how much information is available on the web that an individual does not consent to. More so, disease outbreak researchers can study social-media based patterns to decrease the time it takes to detect an outbreak, an emerging field of study called infodemiology. Within the realm of ecological fieldwork, participatory surveillance is used as an overarching term for the method in which indigenous and rural communities are used to gain greater accessibility to causes of disease outbreak. By using these communities, disease outbreak can be spotted earlier than through traditional means or healthcare institutions.

An infodemic is a rapid and far-reaching spread of both accurate and inaccurate information about certain issues. The word is a portmanteau of information and epidemic and is used as a metaphor to describe how misinformation and disinformation can spread like a virus from person to person and affect people like a disease. This term, originally coined in 2003 by David Rothkopf, rose to prominence in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

References

  1. Web site of the European Medical Students' Association. See "EMSA & IFMSA". Archived from the original on May 3, 2006. Retrieved March 15, 2020.
  2. "World Conference in Heidelberg on Medicine and the Internet" (Press release). University of Heidelberg. 1999-08-27. Archived from the original on 2012-02-05. Retrieved 2008-04-21.
  3. "Centre for global e-health innovation launched in Toronto by Andy Shaw". Canhealth.com. Archived from the original on 2016-03-24. Retrieved 2013-08-18.
  4. "IMIA Working Groups". Archived from the original on July 6, 2010. Retrieved February 19, 2016.
  5. "medicine20congress.com". medicine20congress.com. Archived from the original on 2008-08-28. Retrieved 2013-08-18.
  6. Gunther Eysenbach (2006). "Infodemiology: tracking flu-related searches on the web for syndromic surveillance". AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings. 2006: 244–248. PMC   1839505 . PMID   17238340.
  7. Philip M. Polgreen; Yiling Chen; David M. Pennock; Forrest D. Nelson (December 2008). "Using internet searches for influenza surveillance". Clinical Infectious Diseases . 47 (11): 1443–1448. doi: 10.1086/593098 . PMID   18954267.
  8. Jeremy Ginsberg; Matthew H. Mohebbi; Rajan S. Patel; Lynnette Brammer; Mark S. Smolinski; Larry Brilliant (February 2009). "Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data". Nature . 457 (7232): 1012–1014. Bibcode:2009Natur.457.1012G. doi: 10.1038/nature07634 . PMID   19020500. S2CID   125775.
  9. Gunther Eysenbach (May 2011). "Infodemiology and infoveillance tracking online health information and cyberbehavior for public health". American Journal of Preventive Medicine . 40 (5 Suppl 2): S154–S158. doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2011.02.006 . PMID   21521589.
  10. Gunther Eysenbach (2009). "Infodemiology and infoveillance: framework for an emerging set of public health informatics methods to analyze search, communication and publication behavior on the Internet". Journal of Medical Internet Research . 11 (1): e11. doi: 10.2196/jmir.1157 . PMC   2762766 . PMID   19329408.
  11. Eysenbach, Gunther; Trudel, Mathieu (2005). "Going, Going, Still There: Using the WebCite Service to Permanently Archive Cited Web Pages". Journal of Medical Internet Research. 7 (5): e60. doi: 10.2196/jmir.7.5.e60 . PMC   1550686 . PMID   16403724.
  12. Hall, Jenny. "U of T student-entrepreneur cuts through scholarly information overload with TrendMD". University of Toronto.
  13. "JMIR Publications Makes the Prestigious Growth 500 List". JMIR Publications.
  14. "Founding Members". OASPA. Retrieved 29 July 2021.