Healthcare delivery integration and the evolution of internet infrastructures and complementary assets

Abstract

Although at present no country has embraced completely the internet to redesign healthcare delivery, there has been for several years a keen interest in the incorporation of the latest information technologies in the integration and general transformation of healthcare delivery. This will create a new industry, called e-healthcare, which will make use of the technology infrastructure which supports an increasingly powerful internet adopted by the economy at large. Some countries will lag behind others, depending on the evolution of an array of infrastructures covering not only purely technological factors, but managerial, organisational and institutional ones as well. The evolution of technology, or its transfer to less developed countries, can be better understood by the outward translation in rich versus richness space of a trade-off curve which illustrates the amount and complexity of information interchanged via the internet. By examining a simple integration model consisting at one end of patients with access to computers, intermediary clinics and finally hospitals and research centres at the other end, and the interaction of these three stages with six evolutionary complementary assets and infrastructures, a level of integration for any region or country may be estimated.