Shifting Role of Customer from Recipient To Partner of Care In Healthcare Organization

Most recent e-health initiatives perceive customers (patients) as recipients of medical care where they do not have a significant role in the process of health decision making. However, the advancement of Web 2.0 offers patients to have a greater role in the decision making process related to their health as they can be empowered with the ability to access and control information that fits with their personalized needs. However, providing patient empowerment in e-health through Web 2.0 is challenging task because the complexity nature of healthcare business processes. Empowerment closely relates to the concept of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in managing good relationships with the customers. The adoption of Web 2.0 in CRM systems is known as Social CRM or CRM 2.0. Social CRM emerges to accommodate dynamic means of interaction between patients with their healthcare providers. The aim of this paper is to present a model that embeds empowerment of patient through Social CRM intervention that may extend the role of the patient as an individual health actor, a social health agent, and a medical care partner. A survey has been conducted to gain a feedback from customers regarding the proposed model. A prototype derived from the model namely Clinic 2.0 has also been developed. Using the prototype we measure its impact towards customer satisfaction and health literacy. The results show that the system intervention through Clinic 2.0 improves the level of satisfaction and health literacy of participants.