eHealth Articles & White Papers

A New Look at the eHealth Industry

Ben Dillon - Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

We're deep into the analysis of the data from our 4th Annual Survey on Initiatives in eHealth and we found many familiar themes. The results showed that the importance of the Web among hospitals and health systems is still high, investment and staffing remain strong and there is an incredible amount of new development work underway. In other words, the eHealth industry is moving in the right direction.

To deliver more actionable information to you, we've decided to expand the way we review the survey data. This year, we are segmenting the responses based on organization "type."

We have defined three types of organizations that respond to our survey: eHealth leaders, followers and trailers. Each segment is determined based on how the organization defines their eHealth initiatives and indicates the importance of their online initiatives.

When possible, we are also attempting to translate the numbers into a format that provides a simple benchmark against which we can compare.

Not surprisingly, the results indicate that the leading organizations begin with a positive outlook toward their online initiatives. In fact, 30 percent of leading organizations view their websites as mission critical.

Leading organizations also realize that a leading Web presence can be a source of competitive advantage and they invest in their online initiatives for that purpose.

The investments that organizations make online include a mixture of staff and purchased software and services. The actual investment in each area varies greatly based on the mix of in-house and outsourced resources, so we combined the numbers into a total cost of ownership (TCO).

Leaders invest more than twice what trailers spend on a per-bed basis and more than 25 percent more than follower organizations on a TCO basis. Even when they've incorporated their Web operations throughout their organizations, leading organizations leverage their organizations more effectively; they have more than 40 percent more distributed content contributors on a per-bed basis than trailing organizations.

The most visible way in which the organizations differ is in terms of functionality. Followers have only 78 percent of the functionality provided by leading organizations while trailing organizations have only 51 percent.

The areas where the leaders stand out most (the areas with greatest disparities between the groups) are in the availability of personalization, clinical features and community-oriented capabilities. Followers are closing the gap in areas such as transactional capabilities and site content while trailing organizations remain significantly behind even in these areas.

More detail is available in our webinar, Survey Results 2008: Industry Trends Uncovered.