Abstract
Telehealth practices and applications are rapidly growing with a potential of affecting the delivery of healthcare globally. In the USA, with the predominant access to high-speed Internet and increasing costs of healthcare, telehealth promises Americans to provide convenient access to the services and a chance to reduce their high healthcare expenses. Patients are using the Internet for searching health information and services, and hospitals are informing the patients about the services they provide. Some hospital websites reveal very detailed information on the telehealth services; others only list the names of the services. The extant literature does not report any statistics or findings on how detailed information is provided by the USA hospitals on their websites about telehealth services. Although some studies have surveyed general telehealth practices, and a few studies examined specific telehealth services of the US hospitals, to the best of our knowledge there is scant literature investigating a wide range of telehealth services and the information provided on hospital websites. The objective of this research is to provide insights to both the healthcare providers and policymakers about the current status of telehealth practices in Midwest USA and develop a taxonomy of telehealth services to provide a basis for future studies and guidelines in this domain. In describing our research plan, we focus on the hospitals in the twelve states of the Midwest USA, although our approach can be extended to other regions or nationwide for a broader understanding of telehealth services in the USA. The information extracted from the collected data will provide a picture of the current telehealth services, and the developed framework will help to analyze the data for creating homogeneous groups of telehealth services across different hospitals. The proposed taxonomy and findings of the systematic analysis will be helpful to healthcare providers and policymakers in decision making for improving the effectiveness and delivery of telehealth services.
Recommended Citation
Kartal, Hasan; Singh, Neetu; Alnsour, Yazan; and Hadidi, Rassule, "A Taxonomy of Telehealth Services based on Survey of Hospital Websites" (2019). AMCIS 2019 Proceedings. 57.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2019/treo/treos/57
A Taxonomy of Telehealth Services based on Survey of Hospital Websites
Telehealth practices and applications are rapidly growing with a potential of affecting the delivery of healthcare globally. In the USA, with the predominant access to high-speed Internet and increasing costs of healthcare, telehealth promises Americans to provide convenient access to the services and a chance to reduce their high healthcare expenses. Patients are using the Internet for searching health information and services, and hospitals are informing the patients about the services they provide. Some hospital websites reveal very detailed information on the telehealth services; others only list the names of the services. The extant literature does not report any statistics or findings on how detailed information is provided by the USA hospitals on their websites about telehealth services. Although some studies have surveyed general telehealth practices, and a few studies examined specific telehealth services of the US hospitals, to the best of our knowledge there is scant literature investigating a wide range of telehealth services and the information provided on hospital websites. The objective of this research is to provide insights to both the healthcare providers and policymakers about the current status of telehealth practices in Midwest USA and develop a taxonomy of telehealth services to provide a basis for future studies and guidelines in this domain. In describing our research plan, we focus on the hospitals in the twelve states of the Midwest USA, although our approach can be extended to other regions or nationwide for a broader understanding of telehealth services in the USA. The information extracted from the collected data will provide a picture of the current telehealth services, and the developed framework will help to analyze the data for creating homogeneous groups of telehealth services across different hospitals. The proposed taxonomy and findings of the systematic analysis will be helpful to healthcare providers and policymakers in decision making for improving the effectiveness and delivery of telehealth services.