Customer-Driven Medicine: How to Create a New Health Care System By: Darrell M. West

Executive Summary

Health care today is dominated by physicians, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies, and government agencies. Patients seek to navigate their health care by moving across a variety of providers, ordering prescription drugs from pharmacies, and seeking reimbursement from either public or private insurance plans. They spend hours connecting the dots and working out the best health care for themselves and their families. If they are fortunate to have good providers and effective follow-through, they receive high-quality health care.

E-Health: Improving Health And Healthcare Through The Use Of Information And Communications Technologies

 The «e-Health» action plan shows how to use information and communications technologies (ICT) to provide better quality healthcare throughout Europe, at a stable or lower cost, and to reduce waiting times and errors. The aim of the action plan is the creation of a «European e-Health Area» and it identifies practical steps to achieve this by developing electronic systems for health records, patient identifiers and health cards, and the faster rollout of high speed internet access for health systems to allow the full potential of e-Health to be delivered. The ultimate aim is for e-Health to become the norm among the healthcare profession, patients and the general population by the end of the decade.

What is e-health?

Everybody talks about e-health these days, but few people have come up with a clear definition of this comparatively new term. Barely in use before 1999, this term now seems to serve as a general «buzzword,» used to characterize not only «Internet medicine», but also virtually everything related to computers and medicine. The term was apparently first used by industry leaders and marketing people rather than academics. They created and used this term in line with other «e-words» such as e-commerce, e-business, e-solutions, and so on, in an attempt to convey the promises, principles, excitement (and hype) around e-commerce (electronic commerce) to the health arena, and to give an account of the new possibilities the Internet is opening up to the area of health care. Intel, for example, referred to e-health as «a concerted effort undertaken by leaders in health care and hi-tech industries to fully harness the benefits available through convergence of the Internet and health care.» Because the Internet created new opportunities and challenges to the traditional health care information technology industry, the use of a new term to address these issues seemed appropriate. These «new» challenges for the health care information technology industry were mainly (1) the capability of consumers to interact with their systems online (B2C = «business to consumer»); (2) improved possibilities for institution-to-institution transmissions of data (B2B = «business to business»); (3) new possibilities for peer-to-peer communication of consumers (C2C = «consumer to consumer»).