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Despite the skepticism and inertia of health care managers regarding potential e commerce applications, the Internet eventually will enable health care organizations to markedly reduce their clerical employment and improve productivity. Indeed, the maturation of enterprise computing could generate significant productivity improvements, creating the infrastructure to support network computing applications.
As administrative services are increasingly supported by computer networks, health care enterprises will increasingly outsource functions for which they can achieve economic or efficiency gains. Outsourcing in hospitals historically has been confined to hotel type services such as housekeeping and food services. The Internet will enable outsourcing of core administrative functions such as billing and financial management, data processing, telecommunications, materials management, and human resources, as well as some clinical services such as pharmacy. There are as yet no reliable estimates on the potential productivity gains for health care enterprises from adopting network computing solutions, but my sense is that they will eventually run into the tens of billions of dollars.
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