The Rising Importance of e-Health in Norway Rolf WYNN, a,1 Vicente TRAVER SALCEDO, b Gunnar ELLINGSEN a a UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway b SABIEN-ITACA, Universitat Politècnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain Abstract. Drawing on three central sources of data on the development in e-health use in Norway (studies from the Norwegian Centre for e-Health Research, studies from Statistics Norway, and the Tromsø 7 Study), we describe the rising importance of e-health. Originally restricted to a limited use within the health services, in recent years the use of e-health has gained momentum both in the general population and within the traditional health services, as the Internet has offered easy access to health information as well as a range of other health-related services. Keywords. E-health, statistics, population-based studies, Norway 1. Introduction The importance of e-health to individuals and to health services is rising rapidly worldwide as well as in Norway [1-3]. The Covid pandemic has further strained health services in many countries already struggling with the demands of an increasingly elderly population. In addition to the obvious advantage of reducing person contact during an epidemic, e-health can increase access to services – which may be especially important concerning remote and otherwise underserved populations. Improving patient engagement by focusing on the preventative aspects of life-style changes is also an important feature of many e-health services, which also may alleviate the burden on strained traditional health services. Even before most Norwegians had easy access to the Internet, telemedicine and e- health played a small but important role in the Norwegian health services [4]. The role of telemedicine and e-health was especially important in the more remote and sparsely populated parts of Norway, which had less access to specialized hospital-based services [4]. In addition to videoconferencing, the remote assessment of, for instance, electrocardiograms, retinal scans, x-rays, and pathology samples, have long been important for the health services in the more peripheral parts of the country [4]. As Norwegians have gained access to the Internet and smartphones have become commonplace, new services have been developed. While the most frequent e-health activity has been searching for health information online, other Internet-based services have recently become increasingly important [5]. 1 Rolf Wynn, Department of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway; E-mail: rolf.wynn@uit.no. Challenges of Trustable AI and Added-Value on Health B. Séroussi et al. (Eds.) © 2022 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/SHTI220540 604