Towards an Evaluation Framework for E-Health Services: Evaluating Criteria from Users Perspective

Globally, the healthcare services are considered to be the biggest service industry, and they are taking top priority, receiving enormous investments, and are growing at a rapid pace in most developed countries (Mitchell, 2000; Pan American Health Organization, 1999) E-health, which are basically enabled and driven by the use of information and communication technologies in healthcare have the potential to change the healthcare industry worldwide in terms of their infrastructures, and the costs and quality of services (Wickramasinghe and Misra, 2004; Wickramasinghe and Goldberg, 2004). E-health is a very broad term encompassing various activities in an evolving field. As such, for practical reasons, in this paper the used definition is the one that has been adopted by the World Health Organization. According to the Organisation, E-health can be defined as ‘being the leveraging of the information and communication technology (ICT) to connect aBstract