Abstract
Internet today is one of the most useful tools for information, education and business or entertainment. It is one of the modern technology tools giving us many applications world wide in various fields. One of the most important applications of the Internet is the e-commerce for quality health and medical products. There are an enormous number of Web sites offering health products with the method of E-commerce but still there are many problems with the quality of these products. To the other side many individuals are not able to choice and to know about the quality of these health products that offered today on line with the Internet companies. There are many serious proposals today in to the direction of the quality of the products in health. In this paper summarized many informations about the on line commerce for health products, some of the most popular products and the methodology to train individuals in to the direction to buy and choose quality products. In this paper also presented and analyzed the characteristics and criteria of one serious Internet health company and its Web site. Also how the different scientific organizations can help people and the electronic health commerce to be more effective in to various fields in the division of the popular health. This will be more effective after training and giving criteria and or educating Internet users for a serious choice in to their on line commerce with the E-Health Commerce Web Organizations.
TopIntroduction
The Internet is changing today very fast how people may give and receive health information in various fields of the public health. All people who are able to use the Internet for health-related purposes-patients, health care professionals and administrators, researchers, those who create or may sell any health products or services, and other stakeholders-must join together to create a safe environment and enhance the value of the Internet for meeting health care needs.
Health products may be offered today from various accredited or not companies world wide. This is of course one of the problems existed today in the electronic health commerce. This problem is more usual and bigger today in the Internet with the appearance of many virtual commerce organizations and companies offering plenty of different health products without presenting an official level of quality. It is very easy today to contact with millions of health sites and offerings. Also millions of emails sent every day to every one with offering via Internet for various registered or not health products. This is a big problem because we are not able to know if these companies registered from an official health or any government organization.
Health related Web sites are now amongst the most frequently accessed sites on the Internet with current estimates indicating that there are now over 100,000 sites offering health related information (Eysenbach G, Sa ER, Diepgen TL. 1999) .
The data gathered from multiple stake holders in the health care delivery process provide relevant feedback on the design of an E-health site used to empower patients as the primary consumers of medical services (Payton F.C.-Lucas H. 2001)
There are four generally accepted types of e-commerce:
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Business to Business (B2B)
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Business to Consumer (B2C)
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Government to Business (G2B)
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Government to Citizen (G2C)
All the above types of the E-Commerce found in the E-Health Service (EHS)
TopBackground
The first step of the E-Health commerce began from the world wide affiliations of the international electronic commerce and the Internet population. Public and personal Health was always one of the big problems in the modern people. In to this direction the existed different problems till today with the new character of the public health and the national health systems make individuals to find new directions for their demands. One of these directions is the Internet information resources and e-commerce. Last years the health care industry –a $1 trillion a year market sector – is not, however, largely represented in current e-commerce research.
A recent study sponsored by Cisco Systems estimates that revenue derived solely from E-Commerce increased 127 percent from 1977 to 1998 (Barua, A and A.B. Whinston 1999). This tremendous growth of the E-Commerce can be attributed to a global population and changing demographics of the Internet users that are increasingly accessing the www. (Business Week, 2000) With the creation of the Web in around 1990 by the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee and the Belgian Robert Cailliau working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, anything was changed internationally and continues till today very fast giving many applications to individuals world wide especially in the field of personal or public health.
Slowly in the beginning but very fast today continues growing the E-Health commerce with many different offerings, products and applications. There are millions of Internet sites today offering different health products informations and the opportunity for access of an on line commerce in various products. But this is still a not so serious work.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Electronic Commerce: Is exactly analogous to a marketplace on the Internet. Electronic Commerce (also referred to as EC, e-commerce eCommerce or ecommerce) consists primarily of the distributing, buying, selling, marketing and servicing of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The information technology industry might see it as an electronic business application aimed at commercial transactions; in this context, it can involve electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, e-marketing, online marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), automated inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Electronic commerce typically uses electronic communications technology of the World Wide Web, at some point in the transaction’s lifecycle, although of course electronic commerce frequently depends on computer technologies other than the World Wide Web, such as databases, and e-mail, and on other non-computer technologies, such as transportation for physical goods sold via e-commerce.
E-Health Commerce: This is a division of the electronic commerce. This typically uses electronic communications technology of the World Wide Web, to promote the health products and or to serve local or international individuals in the area of the Social or personal health. Frequently depends on computer technologies other than the World Wide Web, such as databases, and e-mail, and on other non-computer technologies, such as transportation for physical goods sold via e-commerce. The basic tool for the E- health commerce is the Internet technologies.
World Wide Web (or the “Web ”): Is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. The Web was created around 1990 by the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee and the Belgian Robert Cailliau working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards (such as the markup languages in which Web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic Web.
Web Site: Is a collection of Web pages, images, videos and other digital assets and hosted on a particular domain or sub domain on the World Wide Web. A Web page is a document, typically written in HTML, that is almost always accessible via HTTP, a protocol that transfers information from the Web site’s server to display in the user’s Web browser. All publicly accessible Web sites are seen collectively as constituting the “World Wide Web ”. The pages of Web sites can usually be accessed from a common root URL called the homepage, and usually reside on the same physical server. The URLs of the pages organize them into a hierarchy, although the hyperlinks between them control how the reader perceives the overall structure and how the traffic flows between the different parts of the sites.