Dr. Penny Jennett
Head, Health Telematics Unit, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary
President, Canadian Society of Telehealth

With the goal of optimal health for all, what might the vision for the e-health environment look like in another decade?

· The multiple players in the Canadian health and health care environment, along with related industry, will have appropriate access to shared knowledge bases (EHR’s, pharmacy data bases, population health data bases) so that informed timely e-health investment decisions can be made.

• E-health services will be aligned with quality control/risk management, sustainability, impact evaluation statements, and accountability. Required standards, guidelines, protocols, and policies will reside alongside mainstream programs.
• Firm public, private, professional, academic, and community-partnered models, along with appropriate incentives and funding bases, will be in place for ongoing sustainable e-services, as well as continued e-R&D and innovation.
• R&D e-business and e-technology challenges within the e-health sector will have mechanisms in place to explore return on investment-certainty.
• The cyber or e-infrastructure, (consisting of light paths, along with seamless hardware, software, and networks), will have eliminated issues such as speed, size of pipe, number of simultaneous interacting sites, dedicated channels, shared servers, privacy/security, authentication, and/or policy/standards. Indeed everything will be seamless, interoperable, and occur at lightning speed.
• E-health users (providers, consumers, public sector, private sector, researchers) will be using very portable or easy to access “intelligent” third wave or generation technologies (e.g. portable devices, wearing apparel, web servers, central repositories/databases [clinical and research], grid computing, grid services) with great ease. These will serve as enablers to day to day work and decision making - the result being more timely informed decisions about health, health care, and health services. E-Health Training Programs will be in place, where required and appropriate.
• In e-evaluation and e-research, a comfortable blend will exist between peer-to-peer e-applied research applications, and the pure e-research and e-science high-end needs of the nano, grid, visualization, and synchrotron environments. Appropriate research and evaluation tool kits will be available to assess in a quality manner the impact of e-health.
• There will be new pioneers that continue to forge the wave for the future.

Whether we are e-users within the public, private, professional, community, or academic sectors, e-devices, networks, and systems will be a part of acquiring, receiving, or researching health services/care, as well as be a part of achieving optimal health. Virtual communication, including sharing, practicing, learning, researching, and decision making will be a central part of our daily lives as citizens, professionals, organizations, programs, systems, or e-health businesses.