Economic Evaluation of an Investment in Medical Websites and Medical Web-Based Services

19 Chapter’s Concluding Remarks

Moreover, the web presence of any kind of certification, although is a good and easily understandable by the users indicator of the medical websites’ quality, does not seem also to affect neither the success/ excellence of the websites or their lifespan duration. On the other hand, the nature/structure of the organization seem to affect the excellence of the website with websites supported/ provided by governmental institutions and other non-for-profit organizations being higher ranked and presenting greater survivability/sustainability compared to the websites that are supported by profit organizations. It is assumed that one possible explanation is that the users are suspicious about the underlying motives of the website supported by profit entities (e.g. maybe to misleading etc.). In addition to this, from the data analysis it was derived that the medical websites whose content is strictly restrained around a very specific healthcare issue or condition tend to underperform compared to websites whose content covers more general healthcare conditions and presenting a variety of conditions. In general, it is expected for “General information” medical websites to attract a wider range of users and present better traffic, more visits referred from search engines, more unique visits and more websites that include their link. Users tend to spend also more time on this category of websites.

Furthermore, medical websites that have governmental or research funding as a source of revenue tend to outperform websites that support online shops and advertise medical products as a source of income. This comes in accordance with past studies that have shown that in general users tend to mistrust websites that present great amount of advertisement, influenced maybe from the possibly unethical motivations of such websites (e.g. maybe providing them with misleading piece of information in order to drive them to prefer the advertised products etc.) (Walther et al., 2004).

The highest ranked websites present also a much higher web presence in social networks and the users tend to spend more time on them, while a greater percentage of their visits are referred from search engines, something that might be the effect of their reputation. As we have seen, the percentage of visits referred to from search engines is heavily influenced by almost the same factors as the global rank value of the websites. So it is mainly affected by factors that contribute to the success of the medical web websites. Moreover, they present a much higher lifespan duration.

Table Hypothesis testing outcomes

Finally, in our effort to identify the factors that enhance the survivability of the medical websites, it was concluded that almost the same factors that affect the success or excellence of the medical websites affect also their survivability, with the most “long-lived” websites to be supported by non-profit organizations, to offer the ability to the users to locate medical services in close proximity from their location , they have greater web presence in social networks, better rank and in general a higher and more stable traffic flow and other related measurements, as well as the users tend to spend more time on average on them.

Chapter 6: Assessing the value of an investment in Medical Websites

5. 
   
   

20 Introduction

In this chapter attempts are made to assess the value of managing a medical website in the context of Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) and Return on Investment (ROI). In order to assess the value of the medical websites’ offered services and applications first we will estimate the “Benefits” an then the “Cost”, associated with their use.

The “Benefits” will be assessed by estimating the broader value that the services/applications, which are offered by the medical websites, have on the users of these services. For this purpose the use of contingent analysis and more specific of the Willingness to Pay (WTP) approach in an online survey setting was decided, after comprehensive study of the literature and comparison of WTP with the most popular methods used in healthcare evaluations; QALYs and the Human Capital Approach, that will be analysed further below.

The “Costs” will be assessed using sophisticated webpage ranking and traffic moderator tools, as extensions of current web-browsers. The sample that will be used in order to assess the costs related to the operations and service offering of the medical websites will be the same sample of the 316 medical websites, used previously in the afore mentioned study for assessing the factors that majorly affect the success and the survivability of the medical websites.

Finally, having estimated the “Benefits” and the “Costs”, Cost-Benefit and Return on Investment ratios will be calculated as a performance measure, used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment compared to the capital invested in medical websites. In other words the two ratios will be used to assess the yielding benefit of such a kind of investment for the investor.

Download 1.95 Mb.

Share with your friends: