Applications of E-Health for pandemic management

Abstract

During the last century, influenza pandemics caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of hospitalizations, social disruption, and massive economic losses worldwide. With the increase in global transport and communications, as well as urbanization and overcrowding conditions, any novel influenza strain would be likely to spread quickly, and as a result the impact of an influenza pandemic can be even more formidable. E-Health holds great promise in mitigating the impact of a pandemic. This paper discusses the use of E-Health for public health surveillance, and pandemic outbreak investigation and response and also illustrates the idea through a systematic development of a cooperative application of mobile phones (mHealth) for this purpose.