| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 資訊管理研究所 === 88 === Modern information technology and the Internet have triggered the traditional health care industry to undergo unprecedented transformation. This thesis studies the new e-Health business model and investigates a representative dotcom firm Healtheon/ WebMD as well as its several competitors. The purpose is to formulate a strategic framework and to identify key success factors for managing e-Health business. Three principal findings are summarized as follows:
1. The evolutionary locus of Healtheon/WebMD reveals three business focuses — portal, content and e-commerce — supported by connectivity and aiming at creating worldly brand, providing reliable information, and establishing secure transaction platform. The strategy is to apply the new media to enhance the efficiency of medical doctors’ administration and health care management. This is to attract medical doctors as users and, through them, to reach more consumers and patients. Healtheon/WebMD also connects and cooperates with main health care institutions to strengthen its service functions, branding and content provision and to increase medical doctors’ loyalty as users.
2. The comparative analysis of MedicaLogic/Medscape points to another important lesson. Despite the leading position of content, Medscape’s revenue consists mainly of advertising by pharmaceutical companies and the business cannot be sustained long. In order to create more recurring income, Medscape and MedicaLogic merged their businesses. The new firm offers tools and applications in its service portfolio and, using its integrated networks, exchanges and transmits medical doctors-authorized prescriptions and transcripts in case of patients’ medical needs.
3. The e-Health business model primarily centers on 5C (i.e., content, commerce, computing, connectivity, and health care) functions. Its vertical portals need to be able to satisfy users’ needs by providing deep and broad enough services and secure and convenient transaction functions.
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