Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In the healthcare industry, much of the focus in the past couple of decades
has been on innovation in medical technologies that can be deployed in the clini-
cal diagnosis, intervention, and the treatment of diseases. This has brought about
tremendous advances in surgical equipments, non-invasive treatment methods, and
radiological instruments as well as advancements in the pharmaceutical innovation
(i.e., drug discovery) processes.
However, such a focus on medical technologies has been at the expense of a focus
on innovation in the customer-facing services in the healthcare sector. Customer
satisfaction and customer approval rates of many of our hospitals are at an all time
low. Concerns regarding cost and quality have dominated much of the news in the
past several years. The concept of value-driven healthcare organization described
earlier reflects this desire to bring the focus on healthcare quality and the inno-
vations that would help enhance the level of customer satisfaction in healthcare
services.
An important factor that companies in many industries have realized, but perhaps
not the ones in the healthcare arena, is that “quality” is often defined by customer
perceptions of value. As such the ability to “listen to customers” to understand their
needs (Urban & Hauser, 2004) and to embrace them as active participants in ser-
vice innovation - creation and delivery of innovative healthcare services - have
become critical success factors for many healthcare organizations (Mills, Chase, &
Margulies, 1983; Mills &Morris, 1986; Berry, 1995; Nambisan &Nambisan, 2009).
Studies done in other industries have also found that customer participation in
services delivery can significantly improve customers' perceptions about the orga-
nization and its services (Claycomb, Lengnick-Hall, & Inks, 2001; Bowen, 1986;
Wang, Wang, & Zhao, 2007; Kelley, Donnelly, & Skinner, 1990). Such participation
would also allow customers to understand organization's offerings and operations
and increase the perceived transparency - and help move toward the goals outlined
by the value-driven healthcare initiative. In addition, such collaborative arrange-
ments with customers will also bring rewards based on the new incentive structure
that is being proposed in the value-driven healthcare initiative.
More importantly, advances in information technologies has helped to provide
promising opportunities for healthcare organizations to engage their customers (or
patients) in service innovation - creating knowledge that lead to new or improved
services or new ways of disease treatments. In particular, online IT applications -
for example, online health communities, health information websites, etc. - could
support such patient-driven service innovation activities. In sum, IT-enabled cus-
tomer participation in service innovation has the potential to become an important
element of value-driven health care, and as such implies the need for healthcare
organizations to take a careful look at how they can embrace and support such an
approach.
In the following section, we provide some examples to illustrate the specific
nature of consumer participation, namely, consumer knowledge sharing and cre-
ation. This helps to set the context for presenting our theoretical framework in the
following section.
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