Assessing e-health

© 2009 by IGI Global. All rights reserved. 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 e-health. This is due to many reasons, including the fact that the healthcare industry is faced with many complex challenges in trying to deliver cost-effective, high-value, accessible healthcare and has traditionally been slow to embrace new business techniques and technologies. Given that e-health 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.