Developing fully functional e-healthcare information systems: A four-stage framework

Abstract

National governments of most of the countries have started to create the environment and infrastructure for promoting healthcare delivery systems through an electronic mode to their citizens. However, reports the experiences with e-health as chaotic and unmanageable. The purpose of this research is to enrich the comprehensive inter-organisational systems that are currently available for helping e-health development. A four-stage framework was proposed and three main e-public health information system cases in Taiwan help to ground and explain this framework. These stages outline the multiperspective transformation within traditional healthcare structures and functions as they make transitions to e-health through each stage, barriers and challenges for each stage accompany these descriptions. Copyright © 2006 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.