E-Health

This branch is steadily growing due to its social and economic priority. We will be considering E-health here as product, as well as service. The first question we need to ask ourselves is, what type of potential does e-health impact on products and services. Secondly which models and communication strategies are appropriate for companies aspiring to setup in this branch. The pharmaceutical sector is the branch of e-health with the most significant growth, this is due to the evolution in the way drugs are prescribed. The internet as a new communication strategy, provides healthcare researchers a range of benefits.

Online-healthcare is for companies as well as patients very important. In spite of the variety of companies in the healthcare sector, a lot of patients still have problems getting information about their needs, just because they live far away, are disabled, have financial problems or because they have no health insurance. The introduction of telemedicine could solve part of these problems.

Factors like user request, increase in internet transactions, characteristics of internet (not expensive, easy to use,  wide range of coverage, increasing functionalities) and innovations in the healthcare sector are the cause of this driving force in this branch. This steady growing community comprises of suppliers, retailers, investors and consumers. These established dependency, strong competition, complexity in handling information, perception of growth and improvements is what prompts the industry to minimize cost.

Despite the varieties of advantages, there are also numerous disadvantages e.g. laws and legislative rules (privacy protection, directives and accreditations), technical constraints in the care sector, untrustworthy suppliers. These are some of the hindrances in e-health. E-Health can be classified in the following groups: medical equipments, health insurance, pharmaceuticals and clinical services.

Medical equipment supplies: normally, medical establishments like hospitals and clinics purchase their medical equipments from middlemen, the introduction of e-health has made the purchase through the internet possible. Most of the customers that come from this group of people: doctors, home care personnel, self employed nurses or midwives, laboratory assistants etc. Equipments like blood pressure measuring instrument, hospital beds, wheel chairs, blood sugar monitors, first aid kits etc. could be directly purchased online by patients, family members and nurses.

Insurance: While most insurance companies provide online information portals for their customers, others use the e-Commerce system to sell their insurance to other companies or end users. In order to hasten this procedure, most websites are incorporated with electronic forms.

Pharmaceuticals: This includes all medicinal applications which could be got from a chemist, pharmacy or which is prescribed by a doctor. The sort of e-Commerce used here could be in form of a direct sales to a customers or to medical establishments.

Clinical Service: Services like medical diagnosis, treatment recommendations, state of an ongoing treatment could be obtained from a doctor, nurse or a midwife through services like the cyber medicine. Cyber medicine is a distance interaction between a patient and his doctor, the patient registers on the website of the doctor, describes his symptoms and pays with his credit card. He will then be connected with a doctor who diagnoses his illness and if necessary prescribes him some drugs. Cyber medicine is appropriate for patients who due to long distance,  financial problems and little time schedules, can not visit their doctors personally. However the laws and regulations accompanied with medicine e.g. licensing and the quality of service, makes this sort of medical service not so easy. In general the internet as a medical platform is usually considered untrustworthy. Patients could fake illness to obtain ethical drugs from doctors. Also doctors medications could be falsely interpreted.