Abstract:

Objective: To analyze how governments, hospitals and information technology(IT) companies use Internet technology to provide online health services during the early stage of corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic in January 2020 in China, and then provide suggestions and coping strategies for the later stage and post-epidemic time.Methods: We searched for information on ehealth ser-vices related to the outbreak of COVID-19 in China. The sources of information were mainstream search engines such as Baidu and the popular interactive social platforms such as Webchat. The keywords were "Internet+pneumonia", "Internet clinic", "pneumonia online clinic" and so on. The time of information was from January 20 to February 3, 2020. The key information was extracted and encoded by two persons back-to-back. The coding information included: name of organization provider, launching time, location of provider, service items, user, health workers engaging in the service, and so on. The coded information was entered and analyzed with SPSS 24.0 and Excel.Results: There were totally 57 projects launched by local governments, hospitals and IT companies. Most of them were launched from January 24th to 27th, the hospital and government projects services regionally, especially in eastern provinces. In this study, 90.48% of the enterprises and 100.00% of the hospitals had online fever clinic and consultation services for COVID-19, 66.67% of the enterprises and 37.04% of the hospitals serviced derivative health problems. Only a few projects provided tele-medical consultation. There were individual projects that provided online health management for home quarantine people. Physicians were the main force of various projects. In some hospital projects, there were also nurses, pharmacists and professional technicians to provide featured consultation.Conclusion: Ehealth is useful and helpful for the health care system to rapidly cope with health demand during instantaneous and post epidemic time. Regional distribution of ehealth is unbalanced. There are institutional and technical feasibilities for the emergency application of Internet technology. However, community health centers seldom provide ehealth or connect with tertiary hospitals with Internet. Therefore, all kinds of providers within healthcare system should promote emergence ehealth. Tele-medical diagnosis and referral should be developed by local governments during COVID-19. The application of "Internet+medical treatment" in community medical institutions and synergy among various institutions should be promoted.

Key words: Ehealth, Internet, COVID-19, Public health