B2B E-Commerce Adoption and Implementation Constraints and Critical Success Factors in the Healthcare Organizations

Abstract

The adoption and effective utilization of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce in the healthcare industry can potentially assist in setting up an infrastructure which supports complex, multiparty Internet-based trading and transactions among medical products and services suppliers, insurers, wholesalers, and retailers in order to reduce health supply costs. This can lead to many benefits such as an increased accessibility to healthcare providers, faster sharing of information, a higher quality of healthcare services, searchable health information databases, enhanced care delivery capabilities, new product offerings, and reduction in healthcare costs and medical errors. However, despite high expectations for realizing the benefits of B2B e-commerce in healthcare, its adoption remains poorly understood and is also a relatively under-researched area. The potential for realizing significant benefits for implementation of B2B e-commerce does not appear to have been enough to provide impetus for extensive adoption by many healthcare organizations.Although B2B e-commerce provides these organizations a wealth of new opportunities and ways of doing business, it also presents them with a series of challenges. Therefore, the case study approach was utilized to investigate the constraints and critical success factors in adopting and utilizing B2B e-commerce systems in twenty-six organizations in the healthcare industry. The objectives of this research are: (1) to identify B2B e-commerce adoption and implementation constraints and critical success factors for organizations within the healthcare industry; and (2) to develop a framework for managing B2B e-commerce adoption and implementation constraints and critical success factors for healthcare organizations. A key contribution of the paper is to propose a framework in which constraints and critical success factors faced by healthcare organizations undertaking B2B e-commerce activities can be identified and examined.