Assessing e-health

While healthcare is the biggest service industry on the globe, it has yet to realize the full potential of the e-business revolution in the form of ehealth. This is due to many reasons, including the fact that the healthcare industry is faced with many complex challenges in trying to deliver costeffective, high-value, accessible healthcare and has traditionally been slow to embrace new business techniques and technologies. Given that ehealth to a great extent is a macro-level concern that has far reaching micro-level implications, this chapter first develops a framework to assess a country's preparedness with respect to embracing e-health (i.e., the application of e-commerce to healthcare) and from this, an e-health preparedness grid to facilitate the assessment of any e-health initiative. Taken together, the integrative framework and preparedness grid provide useful and necessary tools to enable successful e-health initiatives to ensue by helping country and/or organization within a country to identify and thus address areas that require further attention in order for it to undertake a successful e-health initiative. © 2006, Idea Group Inc.