Lasso the Power of the Internet for Managed Care
By Douglas Goldstein and Joyce Flory, Ph.D.
Reprinted from Infocare, January/February 1997 Material for this article was adapted from the authors' new book, Best of the Net: The Online Guide to Healthcare Management and Medicine (Irwin Professional Publishing, 1996) and Douglas Goldstein's Building and Managing Effective Physician Organizations Under Capitation (Aspen Publishers, Inc. 1996). You'll also find additional related information at the Web site Medical Source (http://www.medsource.com). If you're interested in receiving updates on managed care and World Wide Web sites, consider subscribing to the e-mail newsletters Health.Cruiser, and Medical Source's Online Healthcare Management and Medicine News. |
§1 Introduction
News about the Internet is everywhere. But does the Internet offer managed care organizations and worthwhile business and patient care opportunities? And, if so, how--and how fast--should managed care professionals gain access and build virtual networks to communicate with patients and providers?
The reality is that the Internet is neither a passing fad or a false alarm. It's a dynamic new way for healthcare organizations to disseminate and retrieve information, conduct market research, communicate with broad provider networks, educate consumers on self-care, and sell products and services.
Healthcare's fascination with the Internet will undoubtedly grow rapidly in the years ahead. In 1995, experts identified 100,000 Internet sites, a figure which is projected to mushroom to 500,000 sites by 1998. Experts such as Nicholas Nigroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and author of Being Digital, estimate that the number of WWW sites doubles every 53 days. Likewise, over 12% of the population is online, with over 40% of households having a computer. By the year 2000 over 50% of American households will have access to the Internet and computer pentration will reach over 80%.
Among the Internet's major healthcare components for consumers and professionals:
- Health-Focused Online Services: These
services include the health and medical
components of major commercial services such as
Prodigy, Microsoft Network, America Online, and
Compuserve. Also included in this category are
dedicated online services such as Health Online,
sponsored by Healthcare Forum and Leland Kaiser
and Associates. Physicians Online, a service
exclusively focused on serving physicians, is
sponsored by pharmaceutical companies and has
over 100,000 physician members digitally
connected.
- Clinical Professional Resources on the World
Wide Web Sites: These sites are established
and supported by a variety of healthcare
organizations, including the National Institutes
of Health, which sponsors MedLine and the
Grateful Med clinical databases, as well as
academic medical centers, medical schools, group
practices, associations, and consulting firms.
- Consumer Health and Wellness Resources on the
World Wide Web: A growing number of
individuals and groups have developed informative
Web sites on specific disease states such as
AIDS, heart disease, diabetes, or asthma as well
as new healthcare products or approaches to
treatment. Also in this category is IntelliHealth,
a $25 million joint venture between U.S.
Healthcare and Johns Hopkins Medical Center to
disseminate consumer health information over the
Internet and other mediums. The recently
published Best of the Net--The Online Guide to
Consumer Health and Wellness by Irwin
Professional Publishing has profiled over 150 of
the best Web sites dedicated to delivering
quality health information.
