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Connected health is a model for healthcare delivery that uses technology to provide healthcare remotely. Connected health aims to maximize healthcare resources and provide increased, flexible opportunities for consumers to engage with clinicians and better self-manage their care. It uses technology – often leveraging readily available consumer technologies – to deliver patient care outside of the hospital or doctor's office. Connected health encompasses programs in telehealth, remote care (such as home care) and disease and lifestyle management, often leverages existing technologies such as connected devices using existing cellular networks and is associated with efforts to improve chronic care. The United States and European Union are two dominant markets for the use of connected health in home care service, in part due to the high availability of telephone and Internet service as compared to other parts of the world. Within the United States, over 260 million people have a land line connected, over 190 million are cell phone users, and approximately 200 million are Internet users. The European Union has roughly an equivalent number of people connected to land lines, but prevails over the U.S. with more than 300 million cell phone users and 230 million Internet users. More recent data collected by Pew Internet: Americans and their Gadgets suggest that 86% of US residents own a mobile phone and this number is as high as 96% among Americans aged 18 to 29 years. According to the International Communications Union, it is predicted that there will be 4 billion mobile phone users worldwide by the end of 2008.〔(International Telecommunications Union website ) (Accessed December 10, 2008)〕 The vision of the connected health model can be implicitly understood by contemplating the significant impact of technology on other industries, such as in banking, shopping, logistics and personal communications. Proponents of connected health believe that technology can transform healthcare delivery and address many inefficiencies especially in the area of work flow management, chronic disease management and patient compliance of the US and global healthcare systems. ==History== Connected health has its roots in telemedicine, and its more recent relative, telehealth. The first telemedicine programs were primarily undertaken to address healthcare access and/or provider shortages. Connected health is distinguished from telemedicine by: * A broader concern for healthcare cost, quality and efficiency, particularly as related to the chronically ill * Concomitant interests in making healthcare more patient centric by promoting healthcare consumerism through education, and patient feedback * Efforts in the direction of integrating of data generated outside of traditional healthcare settings such as the home with centralised, often electronic patient record One of the first telemedicine clinics was founded by Dr. Kenneth Bird at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1967. The clinic addressed the fundamental problems of delivering occupational and emergency health services to employees and travellers at Boston's Logan International Airport, located three congested miles from the hospital. Over 1,000 patients are documented as having received remote treatment from doctors at MGH using the clinic's two-way audiovisual microwave circuit.〔("Highlights from the Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Telemedicine Association" ) (Accessed December 10, 2008),Medscape website〕 The timing of Dr. Bird's clinic more or less coincided with NASA's foray into telemedicine through the use of physiologic monitors for astronauts.〔("A Brief History of Telemedicine" ), Telemedicine Information Exchange website, (Accessed December 10, 2008)〕 Other pioneering programs in telemedicine were designed to deliver healthcare services to people in rural settings. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Connected health」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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