JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Fueled by innovations in technology and health interventions to promote, restore, and maintain health, and safeguard well-being, the field of eHealth yielded significant scholarly output.

Objective:

To understand eHealth research trends and multidisciplinary contributions to eHealth, we obtained evidence from three corpora: 10,022 OpenAlex documents with eHealth in title, 5,000 most relevant eHealth articles according to the Web of Science (WoS) algorithm, and all available (n=1,885) WoS eHealth reviews.

Methods:

In VOSviewer, we built keyword and concept co-occurrence networks. The scholarship on eHealth was synthesized by analyzing clusters and adding custom overlays that linked technologies to stakeholders and their needs. A co-citation map of sources referenced in WoS reviews demonstrated scientific fields supporting eHealth. Multidisciplinary contributions were also analyzed as co-occurring hierarchical concepts used by OpenAlex to tag eHealth articles.

Results:

Common research directions included eHealth studies on 1) self-management and interventions; 2) telemedicine, telehealth and technology acceptance; 3) privacy, security, and design; 4) health information consumers’ literacy; 5) health promotion and prevention of disease through active lifestyle choices; 6) mHealth and digital health; 7) HIV prevention. Researchers studied mental health and health literacy of young people; physical activity and lifestyle changes to prevent obesity, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and diabetes in adults and older adults; chronic disease, dementia, and pain management and medication adherence in older adults; cancer survivors and caregivers’ needs; as well as providers and health leaders. Echoing chronological developments in eHealth research, keywords internet (2017 mean publication year), telemedicine (2018), telehealth (2018), mHealth (2019), mobile health (2020), and digital health (2021) were strongly linked to literatures indexed with eHealth (2019) and e-Health (2017) keywords. Mean publication year was 2018.77 for eHealth articles and 2019.80 for eHealth reviews, a time lag of about 12 months. Given the volume of articles, review authors were more likely to focus on interventions and less likely to systematize research on eHealth and health literacy. Review authors cited a wide range of medical journals and journals specific to eHealth technologies, as well as journals in psychology, psychiatry, public health, epidemiology, health services, policy, education, health communication, and other fields. The Journal of Medical Internet Research stood out as the most cited source in eHealth reviews. An OpenAlex concept map confirmed these findings while also displaying a prominent role of political science and law, economics, nursing, business, and knowledge management.

Conclusions:

Drawing upon contributions from many disciplines, the field of eHealth has evolved from studies of internet-enabled communication, telemedicine, and telehealth to research on mobile health and emerging digital health technologies.