Portuguese perception towards ehealth technology for information exchange and weight management within integrated healthcare systems: increasing patient empowerment in portugal health facilities: exploratory study

Abstract

eHealth and mobile apps is a growing market in today millennium technologies. Despite the increase number of mobile apps related to health and wellbeing including weight loss and obesity, there are many aspects influencing its effectiveness that remain unclear. The aim of this dissertation is to understand how Portuguese population will respond to eHealth technology development for information exchange and weight management within healthcare systems. It looked closely to the advantages and understanding the power of eHealth in exchange information between Healthcare providers and patients. This dissertation met the research aim through detailed study of relevant literature, to state the problematic questions that were tested using qualitative and quantitative analysis. Rq1: Will empowering patients with higher access to information exchange reduce healthcare costs? Focusing on medication management? Rq2: Will patients adhere and engage positively to healthcare information within an integrated healthcare services? Rq3: Will a development strategy towards overweight management using mobile apps reduce worldwide healthcare costs? It concluded that there is an increase of eHealth usage by younger generations and that there are predominant effects on using internet for information exchange and to engage patients to increase knowledge on our healthcare services. It also scoped through effects of eHealth apps towards obesity prevention. Further research is needed to develop a meta-analysis between costeffectiveness of developing eHealth apps for the national healthcare system in order to increase patient adherence for information exchange, control medication management and reduce obesity or overweight populations.