Technology-Based Marketing in the Healthcare Industry

The past few years have seen Web-based technology diffusing into a wide cross-section of industries, cutting across various barriers, and changing the way many companies do business. The healthcare industry, though relatively slow to adopt information technology (Eder and Darter, 1998), is no exception. Information technology is transforming the healthcare environment in ways that go beyond simple consumer health information Web sites (Hagland, 1997). Increasingly, the industry is leveraging information technology effectively to manage its business and address issues affecting patient care (Lankford, 1999). At the heart of the healthcare industry lies the patient-physician relationship. The interaction between these two players usually occurs in a clinic/hospital setting. It is generally believed that the relationship between the patient and the physician is influenced not only by this interaction, but also by other interactions that a patient may have inside a clinic/hospital setting, such as interactions with nurses, staff, the registration desk, etc. However, changes brought about by information technology (a) allow players outside the clinic/hospital setting to influence the patient-physician relationship and (b) affect the way in which players and processes inside a clinic/hospital setting influence the patient-physician relationship. This chapter examines how Web technology affects the patient-physician relationship through its impact on players and processes both outside and inside a clinic/hospital setting.