Health care B2C electronic commerce: what do patients/consumers want?

Electronic commerce has transformed the work processes and the way organizations disseminate information to their consumers and business partners. Evidence of new forms of information tools via the WWW increasingly indicate that business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce models require real-time data that enable consumers to make more informative decisions. Patients are demanding more of and from care providers, payers and physicians before, during and after service delivery. To this end, this paper examines consumers´ and health maintenance organization (HMO) executives´ views of a prototype that was developed to disseminate health information. The data gathered from multiple stakeholders 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. Finally, our findings suggest that B2C health care is largely fragmented, despite the real need for consumers of medical services to have real-time access to information from a myriad of sources.