| According to National Health Commission of the Peoples Republic of China,in 2015,the number of elderly people in China undergoing medical examinations reached 118 million.Moreover,according to the latest data released by the National Bureau of Statistics,the number of people aged 60 and over in China has reached about 264 million,accounting for 18.7%of the total population in 2020.With the massive growth of the middle-aged and elderly population,the rigid demand for health and medical services continues to be released.In addition,there is a severe imbalance in the development of urban and rural medical care in China that most high-quality medical resources are concentrated in the city.In order to build an advanced medical service system with balanced development and promote continuous enhancement of people’s health conditions,Chinese government has adopted various new forms to promote the reform of the current medical system.With the widespread use of the Internet in the 21st century,this article holds that the establishment of e-health system serves as an important part of promoting the fairness of medical services,improving people’s health outcome,and transforming the treatment-centric medical system into a value-based health-centric system.In the "Key Tasks for Deepening the Reform of the Medical and Health System in the Second Half of 2020" issued by General Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China,it is particularly emphasized that we should resolve the problems of narrow access to medical care and expensive medical care for the people.The purpose of this research is to study the effect of e-health system development on residents’ health outcome:helping people to see doctor more conveniently and reducing medical expenses.For one side,it is vital to expand the supply of medical services so that people can get diagnosis and treatment without leaving their homes.Moreover,supply expansion will lead to reduction in medical and health expenditures.Therefore,the government only needs to invest a smaller amount of money in medical and health,but it can achieve a better effect.At the same time,the widespread application of e-health has accelerated the construction of medical and health service system centered on people’s health instead of disease treatment.E-health not only involves disease treatment,but also health education,disease prevention,post-ill management,and family doctor tracking.The service is conducive to the whole chain of health management and improves the health outcomes of a larger group of people.This article puts forward research hypotheses from the perspective of empowerment theory and value-based health system,and holds that in the multivariate model,e-health system,traditional offline medical care and ICT development levels have a significant positive impact on health outcomes.At the same time,in the process of studying the impact of e-health system on health outcomes,this article also considers that different countries have different levels of national per capita income,and each country’s spending on medical and health care is different,so this article includes national per capita income and medical and health expenditures as control variables in the research model.The data set used in this study is the questionnaire of the " The Third Global Survey on E-Health " issued by the World Health Organization to its member states in 2015.The survey is to help each member state to speed up the coverage of e-health system so as to meet the high-quality and verified medical needs of all people.Therefore,when this study tries to identify the impact of various variables on health outcomes,it faces problems such as multicollinearity of variables and too many indicators in the data set.To deal with this situation,structural equation modeling is a better choice than traditional regression.Therefore,this research is mainly based on the hierarchical PLS-SEM model.The result of the study shows that e-health system and ICT have a significant positive impact on health outcomes.Although there is still a gap between the effect of e-health system on health outcomes compared with traditional offline medical care.With the continuing improvement of ICT,e-health system is expected to have larger and deeper impact on residents’health outcomes comparing to traditional offline medical care.In addition,this article holds that e-health is beneficial to upgrade the entire chain of residents’ health management.Traditional offline medical care focuses mainly on the treatment of diseases,while e-health can not only contribute to the popularization of health knowledge,disease prevention,and treatment of chronic diseases,but also continuous self-management,post-illness management and family doctor operations,which will increasingly impact on residents’health outcomes,since e-health plays a major role in disease prevention and post-illness management.As a precondition for the development of e-health,ICT has also had a significant positive impact on health outcomes.The development of ICT and e-health at the same time will bring a huge improvement to the health outcomes of the country’s residents.Therefore,this article finds that m-health services,tele-health services and so on are all included in the research of e-health system,which surpasses the predecessors in terms of research breadth.Beyond that,this study also contains 125 countries.In the field of macroscopic research of e-health,the sample size is fairly large.Due to the richness of the samples,the research results of this article are also applicable to countries with different levels of development so as to help them to improve the health outcomes of their residents.Finally,this article finds that e-health has a significant effect on improving the health outcomes of residents,and this article echoes this role in our country’s efforts to build a medical service model centered on people’s health.The results show that controlling medical and health expenditures as well as maximizing the efficiency of the medical system are extremely valuable in the current world. |
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