Exploring the trust factor in e-medicine

The increasing presence of the Internet in the medicine market is making it necessary to examine the ethics and privacy issues related to dispensing medical advice and information on the Web. In order to successfully regulate e-medicine practices, a comprehensive set of regulations must be established to supplement existing corporate attempts at self-regulation. This paper details some of major factors that must be present to achieve acceptable levels of e-privacy/e-security at the B2C (business-to-customer) level and manage the confidentially and trust afforded to e-clinicians. One of the most important issues among Web-enabled medicine providers is how to secure trust and loyalty among customers. This can be accomplished by providing reliable and accurate information, while safeguarding an individual's private information from third-party collaboration and loss of integrity. Various examples and a conceptual model using basic concepts of reliability theory and the resource-based view of the firm were used to identify the factors necessary to achieve privacy and ethics in an e-medicine environment.