Patient-Oriented Interactive E-health Tools on U.S. Hospital Web Sites

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to provide evidence for strategic planning regarding e-health development in U.S. hospitals. A content analysis of a representative sample of the U.S. hospital Web sites has revealed how U.S. hospitals have taken advantage of the 21 patient-oriented interactive tools identified in this study. Significant gaps between various types of hospitals have also been found. It is concluded that although the majority of the U.S. hospitals have adopted traditional functional tools, they need to make significant inroad in implementing the core e-business tools to serve their patients/users, making their Web sites more efficient marketing tools.

KEYWORDS:

• health care new media
• e-health
• hospital Web sites
• interactivity

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Brittany Harman for her help with sampling for this study and Aye-Nu Elizabeth Duerksen for proofreading this manuscript.

Notes

Note. Percentage calculations are based on 712 sampled hospitals that had a Web presence.

^a These are interface designs that promote some of the interactive tools.

Note. Percentage calculations are based on 712 sampled hospitals that have a Web presence. Numbers in the “Frequency” column indicate the numbers of hospitals that have at least one tool in a given category.

Note. The numbers in the table are chi-square values. Small hospital = 1–100 beds; medium hospital = 101–250 beds; large hospital >250 beds. Best hospital designation was based on health.usnews.com.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

U.S. hospitals are ranked yearly in terms of their IT development. More information and rankings can be found at http://www.hhnmostwired.com/hhnmostwired_app/index.jsp.

People even disagree on how the term should be spelled: e-health, eHealth, E-health, or e-Health.

See examples in Catallo (2008, p. 27).

The list can be found at http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals by searching every state.

Small size = 1–100 beds, medium size = 101–250 beds, and large size = more than 250 beds.

Even though some sites incorporated external interactive health care information, such information was counted as internal since such information was housed under the specific hospital Web site instead of being shown on an alien site. From a user's perspective, the user may not know that such information is syndicated by an external vendor.

Ed Bennett, director of Web Strategy for University of Maryland Medical Center, meticulously documented the trend of how hospital Web sites subscribed to social media on his popular blog site Found In Cache. His updated list of U.S. hospitals on social media can be found at http://ebennett.org/hsnl/.

See http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking.