Identifying Personalization in a Care pathway: a single-Case Study of a Finnish Healthcare Service Provider

Personalization has been extensively studied by scholars both in information systems and business. With a strong technological emphasis in mind, personalization techniques are widely applied in web context for recommending appropriate products and services for users. Typically, personalization has remained marketer-oriented, where service provider makes the decision of suitable products or services that are recommended for users. That viewpoint follows the goods-dominant (G-D) logic principles, where service providers use personalization to deliver services for the customer. In this paper, we examine personalization of entire service process, not only the technical interfaces used as service touchpoints. We focus our study on personalization in the healthcare service processes by using service-dominant (S-D) logic as our analytical lens. A case study was conducted by analyzing the depression care pathway of a Finnish healthcare service provider. As a result, we recognized different categories of service personalization, which were supported and mediated through information systems. We recognized three primary categories of personalization: coercive personalization, data display personalization, and collaborative personalization. In all these service personalization categories, information technology played a role, which could range from fully automated personalization to support provided for the physician and the healthcare user for collaborative decision making. The present results are well aligned with findings of other researchers on role of technology in personalization, and provide additional insight on role of information systems in service level personalization.