JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

The health sector is highly digitised. This digitisation is enabling the collection of vast quantities of electronic data about health and wellbeing. The Information Communication Technologies collecting these data are varied depending on the area of healthcare but can include systems used by healthcare organisations, consumer and community sources such as information collected online, and passively collected data from technologies such as wearables and devices. Understanding the breadth of technologies, the health system uses to collect data, and the myriad ways it can be actioned is a challenge for researchers, consumers, health professionals, governments and other key stakeholders. This viewpoint aims to describe the Information Communication Technologies that collect electronic data within the health ecosystem. A secondary aim is to better understand how the data from these systems is being actioned for both primary and secondary uses. A purposeful review of the literature was undertaken to describe the different Information Communication Technologies that collect electronic health data and classify them into broad categories, and the ways in which these different electronic health data sources have been utilised to date. The review was augmented with the domain knowledge from the authors to develop use cases to illustrate how electronic health data could be actioned to improve health care in future. A taxonomy of electronic health data sources is presented. This taxonomy describes the ways in which data is currently being actioned for primary and secondary uses.