Title: E-healthcare in Taiwan

Authors: Ching-Chang Lee, Ting-Peng Liang, Yen-Ching OuYang

Addresses: Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Department of Information Management, Fortune Institute of Technology, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Abstract: The proliferation of the internet has enabled many distance services that would not have been available otherwise. One of them is e-health. Many services in healthcare such as medical advice and distance diagnosis can be delivered over the internet. Providing healthcare services over the internet electronically is called e-health. The purpose of this study is to investigate e-health in Taiwan. A survey of websites for e-health was conducted to examine the available services and their development. The results indicate that e-health services include contents for physicians, contents for patients, e-commerce applications and e-care to patients. Among them, disease information and patient advising were the most popular functions (about 90% of the sites provide them), whereas e-commerce was less popular (less than 20%). The results are interpreted by the transaction cost and other models.

Keywords: electronic commerce; e-health; web-based systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHTM.2002.001126

International Journal of Healthcare Technology and Management, 2002 Vol.4 No.1/2, pp.1-14

Published online: 30 Jun 2003 *

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