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 over the past quarter century.

Objective:

To understand the big picture of research developments and multidisciplinary contributions to eHealth that have shaped this field by 2024, we analyzed 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:

Using VOSviewer, we built co-occurrence networks for WoS keywords and OpenAlex concepts. We examined clusters, categorized terminology, and added custom overlays about eHealth technologies, stakeholders, and objectives. A co-citation map of sources referenced in WoS reviews helped identify scientific fields supporting eHealth. After synthesizing eHealth terminology, we proceeded to build a conceptual model of eHealth scholarship grounded in bibliometric evidence.

Results:

Several research directions emerged from bibliometric networks: eHealth studies on self-management and interventions, especially in mental health; telemedicine, telehealth and technology acceptance; privacy, security, and design concerns; health information consumers’ literacy; health promotion and prevention; mHealth and digital health; and HIV prevention. Conducted at the individual, health system, community, and society level, eHealth studies focused on health and wellness across the human lifespan. 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). Different types of eHealth applications were supported by research on infrastructures: networks, data exchange, computing technologies, information systems, and platforms. Researchers’ concerns for eHealth data security and privacy, including advanced access control and encryption methods, featured prominently in the maps, along with terminology related to health analytics. Review authors cited a wide range of medical sources and journals specific to eHealth technologies, as well as journals in psychology, psychiatry, public health, policy, education, health communication, and other fields. The Journal of Medical Internet Research stood out as the most cited source. The concept map showed a prominent role of political science and law, economics, nursing, business, and knowledge management. Our empirically derived conceptual model of eHealth scholarship incorporated commonly researched stakeholder groups, eHealth application types, supporting infrastructures, health analytics concepts, and outcomes.

Conclusions:

Drawing upon contributions from many disciplines, the field of eHealth has evolved from early studies of internet-enabled communications, telemedicine, and telehealth to research on mobile health and emerging digital health technologies serving diverse stakeholders. Digital health has become a popular alternative term to eHealth. We offered practical implications and recommendations on future research directions, as well as guidance on study design and publication.