Advances in E-Health

E-health offers new ways to access health information, to deliver health and social care and to perform self-management. The adoption of e-health solutions by citizens, patients, health professionals, and healthcare providers has increased substantially during the last decade. For instance, in the European region, more than half of WHO member states have developed national e-health strategies [1]. A common goal in most strategies is to strengthen health systems through the implementation of digital technology. The World Health Organization has recently issued the Global Strategy on Digital Health (2020–2025) [2] to give guidance for the development and adoption of appropriate, accessible, affordable, scalable and sustainable person-centric digital health solutions to prevent, detect and respond to epidemics and pandemics, developing infrastructure and applications that enable countries to use health data to promote health and well-being, and to achieve the health-related Sustainable Development Goals.

To achieve this vision, evidence-based development of e-health services is crucial to offer high quality and effectiveness and to overcome some of the most challenging issues regarding accessibility, inequality, and equity in health and social care delivery, not least in times of pandemics.

The scope of this Special Issue is to outline some of the major challenges and future perspectives of e-health for health and social care delivery as well as self-management.

In this Special Issue, researchers share their latest achievements. It covers a diversity of work that reflects the state-of-the-art of issues and challenges regarding e-health design, implementation and adoption for a variety of stakeholders.