What is E-Health Strategic Planning

Nowadays there are a myriad of e-Health services. Due to their innovative character, these services often lack systematization raising difficulties when selecting, implementing or evaluating an e-Health service. The purpose of this chapter is introducing the reader to different types of e-Health services and to providing guidelines for the development of a strategic plan for e-Health. The authors present a list of sixteen e-Health services’ types discussing their main potentials, features and requirements and characterising them according to a multi-dimensional attributes model. This classification model groups e-Health services in order to perform case studies analysis and benchmarks between services inside each group. The attributes dimensions used are: interaction pair, type of interaction, main goals and measurement of impact and critical success factors. The authors also discuss the processes of planning, selecting, implementing and evaluating e-Health services, based on their perspectives and on a review of existing literature, identifying major problems and purposing guidelines.