e-Health Models Leading to Business-to-Employee Commerce in the Human Resources Function

Evidence of new forms of information tools via the World Wide Web increasingly indicate that business-to-consumers e-commerce models require real-time data that enable users to make informative decisions. Although the Web has provided a variety of e-health sites, these sites have offered little in the way of enabling the human resources (HR) function. This article examines health care consumers’ views of an existing health maintenance selection process. Data are gathered from employees of a southeastern university that offers a myriad of health maintenance organization (HMO) services. The findings suggest that HR–enabled health care Web portals must include consumer-defined features such as rank-ordered preferences by employees, privacy/security functions, and electronic enrollment during the HMO selection process. Despite these results, participants in the survey did not advocate the elimination of human interaction in this effort, instead supporting the concept of businessto-employee commerce.