Cutting Edge Issues

eHealth:
Towards A New World of Communications in Medicine

Case Study: Overlake Hospital Medical Center

Information on Demand: Consumer-Controlled Medical Records

Finding Leaders for Internet Health Care

Building the Security-Capable Enterprise

Planning Business Strategies with Internet Support

Internet Use as a Survival Strategy

Case Study Zone

Who is eMed?

Case Study: Overlake Hospital Medical Center, Bellevue, Wash.

Part 3

WELCOME TO THE WEB

As a profession, medicine has grown up in an enterprise-centered environment. Colleagues contend that people will always get sick, so they will always need physicians and hospitals. They are always going to come to us, so, in their view, we need not worry about marketing, or about using the Internet. The new reality, however, is that people will still get sick, but they may not go to physicians. Even if they do, they will coordinate their own care. If your medical practice, hospital, clinic, or group is not on the Web, it needs to get there now and draw people to it. This much is certain: those who control the information control the market.

Who controls the information today? Who is going to control the medical record in the future? Not physicians, hospitals, or health systems, but patients. They will dictate how they want to be treated. The good news for physicians is that, despite all the information sources available, people would prefer to get their medical information from their own providers -- if they could. For this, they will need better access to physicians, and physicians will need to be more communicative. Consumers turn to other sources of health information only when they cannot obtain satisfactory information from their physicians.

Health care ecommerce is going through a transition from online brochures to more interactive environments. We began with content, moved to connectivity, then moved to commerce, and finally moved to care. Overlake Hospital’s Web site demonstrates this kind of evolution. First, like all hospitals, we put up content: listings of service lines and replicas of marketing brochures, with articles added. Next, we added connectivity. If email is all the rage, and we have all these high-tech people admitted to Overlake Hospital, wouldn’t it be a good idea if their friends and families could email them? Our web site allowed users to send email to patients in the hospital. For the use of the grandparents and traveling fathers of newborns, who cannot yet meet the infants in person, we (and many hospitals nationwide) make still pictures and videoconferencing available.

Commerce came next. If people are visiting the Web site to see babies and send email to inpatients, maybe they would like to order flowers or balloons. Suddenly, the Web site turns from an expense into something that generates a little revenue.

We have not yet moved completely into the care arena at Overlake Hospital, but we do allow our patients to register online. Two buttons on our Web site are very important to us. One reads, “staff only.” I cannot tell you how much email has changed my life. None of us could do our work and stay connected to our institutions, were it not for email. We have made email available to all of our employees. The second button reads, “physicians only.”