The Internet is set to transform many industries but arguably few as thoroughly as the healthcare industry.
The Internet is giving rise to a vast range of new healthcare services and service providers. Most significantly it is empowering consumers with choice and injecting competition amongst healthcare providers.
After sex, books and music, health issues are the most common subject of searches on the world wide web. According to a recent Harris Poll, around 70 million Americans used the web last fiscal year for referrals about health. And they have plenty of sites to choose from with an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 health related website currently available.
Most people use the web as a substitute for libraries and for chatting. Increasingly however, the web is being used to provide services that directly compete with traditional health providers. The most popular of these are support groups which provide assistance with counselling, alternative treatments, drug options and advice. The evidence is that the support groups are proving to be highly competitive, with one recent survey rating them higher than doctors in 10 of the 12 dimension of care.
On-line doctors and pharmacies are beginning to arise, particularly in the US and Canada. Although it is early days, doctors are beginning to offer on-line diagnosis, prescriptions renewals, specialist referrals, and information on treatment plans. On-line pharmacies have already made large inroads in North America. They have sprung-up in Australia and sales are expected to increase dramatically over the next few years.
The North American on-line pharmacies are also enjoying a health trade in international sales particularly for drugs like Viagra, which are in big demand but caught up in local red tape.
Two other innovations spawned by the Internet of particular interest to Australia are distance medicine and vesting of medical records. On-line medicine greatly expands the geographic scope of service providers thereby bringing alternative services and expert skills to areas where these are scarce. One such example is an on-line health service targeting aboriginal people in Canada.
One of the greatest problems in health care is the fragmentation and inaccessibility of personal medical records. A web based solution being developed in the US is for records to become the property of the patient rather then health providers and for the records to be stored electronically by independent "infomediary" and accessible from anywhere with the patients permission.
Probably the most fundamental reform on offer through the Internet is information about the performance of health care providers. Currently the relative performance of doctors and hospitals is covered in a shroud of secrecy. The implicit assumption -- which everyone knows is nonsense -- is that providers give uniformly superlative services. In truth, the secrecy in designed to limit competition. On-line health infomediares are beginning to lift the shroud. For example, the Australian Bad Medicine site provides information on poorly performing doctors and hospitals. More comprehensively, a website in Singapore provides a detailed price list of all the services provided at all hospitals in the city-state.
As with everything on the web, there are questions of quality and usefulness, but there is no doubt that it will prove a real winner for health consumers.
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