eHealth… a new vision for healthcare
Innovation, Modernization, Transformation… strong words… but unequivocally define the affect of the internet on today’ businesses. e-Commerce has transformed banking and financial services, retailing, publishing, manufacturing, entertainment and is now occurring in healthcare. eHealth – the application of e-commerce to healthcare is here!
eHealth opens up entirely new paths of communication and transactions in healthcare and fosters new business patterns and organizational configurations that are essential to maintaining viability in the changing marketplace.
eHealth...not simply a function of marketing and web presence…
It is an initiative that forces change at every level of business. eHealth is being facilitated by the opportunities created with Web2.0 functionality; requiring new procedures, performance monitoring, change control, approvals and content management capabilities, with close coordination between content, presentation, and related business or clinical processes of the entire organization.
eHealth offers clear potential benefits:
- Enabling patients/members and staff to do more with less support
- Building relationships and brand equity with patients, physicians and affiliated providers
- Streamlining managed care contract administration and claims processing
- Improving access to vital patient information at the point of care to reduce cost and improve care delivery
- Transforming the organization, building market image and position, improving employee productivity and morale
- Facilitating pharmaceutical research, clinical trials and regulatory submission, promoting direct contact with consumers
As the wave of Internet technology sweeps towards healthcare, executives have important strategic decisions to make. Proactively understand the potential of the Internet in healthcare and direct its power to the benefit of their employees and patients. Or allow the new technology to roll uncontrolled through and around their organizations. Choosing the latter will effectively hand over their market to faster-moving, better-focused competitors -- some of whom do not even exist yet.
Strategic Possibilities in eHealth
By collapsing the traditional gap between business strategy and information strategy, eHealth opens up strategic options in health industries that are limited only by imagination and the ability to execute.
Some of what we are seeing today… and looking for tomorrow:
- On-line "communities" linked to a hospital, provider or health plan website, and open to a broad range of marketing messages. The difference in cost between reaching 100 people on the Internet and reaching 100,000? Near zero.
- Patient self-management programs that allow patients to assume more responsibility for and control over their own care. The provider website provides patient education, monitoring, clinician intervention and e-mail. The benefit: more efficient use of provider resources, improved patient relations.
- Radically re-engineered delivery networks built around end-to-end information flow rather than disjointed processes patched together by computer systems.
- Web-based telemedicine
Developing an eHealth Strategy
The healthcare industry is extraordinarily complex and turbulent, with rapidly changing business models. As an industry, healthcare has been a laggard in adopting web enabled technologies as a basic business tool compared to other major industries such as banking and retail. The ability of the industry to achieve large-scale efficiencies is restrained by legal and regulatory barriers and a deeply conservative medical culture.
Impact Advisors understands these factors and has helped clients to understand the opportunities, limitations and realities of embracing the web to embark on an enterprise focused eHealth Strategy.
Our strategy team has more than 15 years of consulting, business, industry and IT experience. Leveraging this experience and creating specific best practices, we help organizations achieve substantial results. Our consultants utilize proven methodologies to help our clients determine how technology can create efficiencies, streamline business process and increase the quality of patient care through a well defined eHealth vision.