I can't think of a better way to consolidate my education and experience than under the umbrella of eHealth.
I have been attempting to do this as a freelance editor, researcher and project manager. My projects have been varied and interesting but on the whole somewhat disjointed - not unlike the current state of our healthcare system.
My education and work experiences are practical and multidisciplinary and through them my picture of eHealth has taken shape like this:
As a student biologist I assisted researchers at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters collect water samples and data from marshes and a number of Great Lakes intake stations. We used FORTRAN to analyze and process the data to determine the quality of the water that we drink.
When I was a COBOL programmer I wrote an article for the CIPS Review (1985). In it I describe medical IT at McMaster pre-Bill Gates.
As a project manager and editor I helped a medical technology company commercialize its research in the form of a web-based health monitoring device. I saw the effects of regulatory compliance on a private corporation trying to find an entry point in the healthcare sector. This company's concept of health record is radical.
As a researcher I cover conferences for clients. I attended and documented the eHealth Conference in 2003 and 2005. One of the highlights was a tour of Alex Jadad's lab at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation.
I copyedit research papers for traditional and open source medical journals. The Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics is an open source publication that uses software developed by the Public Knowledge Project. The public access to science debate continues to centre around copyright and subscription vs publishing fees.
As a user and consumer of healthcare I offer my clients a very realistic "patient" perspective - recently I helped a company shift the focus of their online patient education (cancer) from a diagnostic and treatment orientation to a more inclusive orientation involving survivorship and supportive care.
As a Mom I have to keep up with Web 2.0 technologies so that I can communicate with my children. I chuckled when I read about the Toronto Department of Health allowing its staff to use Facebook to track down a woman bitten by a rabid bat - a population eHealth application for sure!
As a caregiver I continue to discover the absolute necessity of accurate, relevant and portable health information. It can be a matter of life and death, as the Claire Lewis case clearly demonstrated.
The innovative new Masters of Science eHealth program at McMaster University will give me the necessary and consolidated foundation I seek in both research and industry, and will enable me to make a more significant contribution to the use and advances of technology in healthcare.
As I have found, eHealth is all encompassing. It touches every aspect of life. My hope is that one day technology will be so seamlessly integrated into healthcare that we will be able to drop the first "e" in eHealth.
Margaret Leyland