Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December 5, 2008

Ehealth- The Competitive Advantage

Defining e-health - where are we? E-health is health's version of e-commerce: that is, conducting health business electronically. E-health is the combined use of electronic communication and IT in the health sector, both at the local site and at a distance for clinical, educational and administrative purposes (Unstoppable rise of e-health, 1999). E-health is a broad, encompassing term that envelops information technologies and telecommunication technologies. Telehealth, the provision of health at a distance using telecommunications, is subsumed by e-health. Unfortunately there is a lot of confusion about this new field and some vendors are getting onto the hype bandwagon by adding "e-" to old solutions. Many new initiatives remain unproven, and, like modern art, time will tell which shall endure. Users' strategic goals and end users' needs should drive solutions and not the vendors or suppliers’ business models. However, sometimes the users' needs are latent a