While print media had been the traditional communication medium for most physicians for a long while, many have been recognizing the fact that there is not a single medium that can compete with the Internet, its coverage and incredible power on public. Accordingly, the healthcare industry has been in the process of adopting the Internet as a new method of communication. Physicians are now providing their patients with de- tailed information about issues such as nutrition, diets, and disease prevention, and displaying before-and-after pictures in case of some surgeries, etc. They are able to do all these lot more cost-effectively on the Internet than they would be able to on other traditional outlets such as newspapers, magazines, and brochures. Not to mention that these outlets are effective mostly in the short-run since many are discarded after they are read once. The coverage on the Internet can be updated quickly and inexpensively and it may be used to provide virtual tours of the providers’facilities(Shepherd and Fell 1998).All these cost savings lead to a lower overhead in the long run.
Once the Internet is adopted as the new communication medium, it needs to be emphasized that an e-commerce strategy will be composed of many more comprehensive tasks using this new communication mode. For instance, on-line marketing activities of hospitals include components such as discussion groups, research, communications with doctors and patients, newsletters, referrals, intranet, disease management, health education, physician directory, recruiting, e-mail, and website (Fell and Shepherd 2001). While all these are essential, 95.7 percent of marketers who state using online marketing strategies de- scribe their websites as their primary basis for marketing. Obviously, it is a fact that a website itself remains the cornerstone of e-commerce and this fact requires a good understanding of what is required in developing these websites. While most healthcare organizations use websites primarily for promotion and some recruiting purposes, better ones are adding more creative functions such as interactivity between doctors and patients, and sites that link physicians to clinical data repositories. Even though there are many cost effective ways to incorporate some of these options (Solomon 2001), most are still somewhat expensive but they point to the very essence of e-commerce. Obviously, it does not make sense to attract users to a site before making sure that it offers the content and functionality that those users value (Swartzendruber 2003