How Healthcare Products and Services Sector uses eB2B?
Business processes found in the healthcare sector that have been impacted by business-to-business e-commerce (eB2B) include finding doctors, researching prescriptions, and collecting payments. eB2B allows healthcare providers and insurance companies to share information in a collaborative format with consumers (Ray, 2006).
This enables a patient to research doctors and pharmacies inside their insurance network and choose one that is right for them based on the patient’s needs. eB2B also allows a patient to manage payments and billing online. Additionally, prescriptions can be transferred to the pharmacy of the patients choosing. This is a dramatic change from years ago when the doctor or pharmacy was chosen because it was close to home or referred by family (Coile Jr., 2000).
These healthcare sector eB2B practices are process oriented improvements concerned more with the logical flow of data. They improve efficiency rather than actually improving the effectiveness of any one system. For example, automating billing is more efficient than effective, requiring users to have computer experience and the organization to provide IT specialists to run the networks and databases (Mustafa, 2004).
One policy action that could improve the cybersecurity posture of the healthcare industry would be the use of bring your own device (BYOD). Studies show that 90% of the average fulltime workers in the US use personal devices at work. In the healthcare industry research has revealed that 88.6% of workers use personal devices. This high number coupled with the fact that over 54% of the industry admits that they cannot tell if off site workers are following BYOD policy or not is staggering.
The BYOD policies for health care must host applications in a sandbox to maintain security. Another area for improved securing BYOD and verifying its proper use off-sight would be remote scanning of connected devices. Healthcare organizations may want to ban BYOD completely as a risk to the security of information (Burns & Johnson, 2015).
References
Burns, A. J., & Johnson, M. E. (2015). Securing health information. IT Professional, 17(1), 23-29. doi:10.1109/MITP.2015.13
Coile Jr., R. C. (2000). E-health: Reinventing healthcare in the information age. Journal of Healthcare Management, 45(3), 206. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.umuc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.umuc.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=3355952&site=eds-live&scope=site
Mustafa, Y. (2004). E-health centre: A web-based tool to empower patients to become proactive customers. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 21(2), 129-133. doi:10.1111/j.1471-1842.2004.00484.x
Ray, J. J. (2006). Business-to-business electronic commerce. In H. Bidgoli (Ed.), Handbook of information security (Vol. 1). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.