Digitization in Healthcare

Abstract

Di­gital health­care is con­stantly evolving, with more and more in­nov­a­tions emer­ging in the in­dustry. This has been ac­cel­er­ated sig­ni­fic­antly with the emer­gence of the COVID-19 and the de­vel­op­ment of the pan­demic situ­ation. The re­lo­ca­tion of health­care to the on­line space, i.e. telemedi­cine ser­vices, has already emerged in the early 21st cen­tury, but it was un­doubtedly the pan­demic in 2020 that has provided new op­por­tun­it­ies for com­pan­ies in the sec­tor to de­velop. The aim of our study is to ex­plore the opin­ions and the know­ledge of the Hun­garian people about telemedi­cine ser­vices. Based on the res­ults of an on­line sur­vey (188 re­spond­ents), it can be said that a sig­ni­fic­ant pro­por­tion of people do not know what ex­actly telemedi­cine is. The key be­ne­fits of telemedi­cine ser­vices are the less crowded hos­pit­als and doc­tor’s of­fices, faster ad­min­is­tra­tion, and re­cog­ni­tion of severe symp­toms. The re­spond­ents con­sidered as main dis­ad­vant­ages were the un­clear price-to-ser­vice ratio and the col­lec­tion of mis­un­der­stood in­form­a­tion and the ser­vices offered out­side pub­lic fin­an­cing. The telemedi­cine ser­vices that most people have already used are the e-pre­scrip­tion, book­ing of per­sonal con­sulta­tion and the e-re­fer­ral. Look­ing to the fu­ture, the ma­jor­ity is op­tim­istic and ex­pects the de­vel­op­ment of di­gital health­care. Based on the res­ults, we have iden­ti­fied six pos­sible di­gital mar­ket­ing cam­paigns for the telemedi­cine com­pan­ies, tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion the goals, the con­tent, and the tar­get audi­ence.