Paper Details

ABSTRACT

The Internet, which brought the most innovative improvement on information society, has also brought many remarkable changes of healthcare services. Via the Internet, accessing information about healthcare services became relatively easier for service consumers who need adequate medical treatments. Moreover, consumers can communicate with doctors to get medical advices or to make appointment by e-mail or instant messengers, which are more convenient communication channels than by phone. Because of these benefits, much more healthcare service providers started publishing web sites for their service on the Internet competitively; as a consequence, consumers can obtain wide choice of services and better service quality.However, there are also negative effects caused by exponential growth of the healthcare web sites. Because of too much information available, consumers cannot easily choose proper healthcare service among them. Some of them might not be able to judge what healthcare services are helpful because evaluating those services usually requires medical expertise. Moreover, there might be over-advertising web sites that show off exaggerated information about services.