The Competitive Forces Facing E-Health

Superior access, quality, and value of healthcare services has become a national priority for healthcare to combat the exponentially increasing costs of healthcare expenditure. E-Health in its many forms and possibilities appears to offer a panacea for facilitating the necessary transformation for healthcare. While a plethora of e-health initiatives keep mushrooming both nationally and globally, there exists to date no unified system to evaluate these respective initiatives and assess their relative strengths and deficiencies in realizing superior access, quality and value of healthcare services. Our research serves to address this void. This is done by focusing on the following three key components: 1) understanding the Web of players (regulators, payers, providers, healthcare organizations, suppliers, and last but not least patients) and how e health can modify the interactions between these players as well as create added value healthcare services, 2) understand the competitive forces facing e-health organizations and the role of the Internet in modifying these forces, and 3) from analyzing the Web of players combined with the competitive forces for e-health organizations we develop a framework that serves to identify the key forces facing an e-health and suggestions of how such an organization can structure itself to be e-health prepared. © 2006, IGI Global. All rights reserved.