Future Research on Dimensions of E-Service Quality in Interactive Health Portals: The Relevancy of Actor-Network Theory

Today, the interaction between patients and Interactive Health Portals (IHPs) is one of the hot topics of e-health domains. Online Health Organisations (OHOs) try to improve the quality of their online services to increase patients’ demand. However, Malaysian OHOs are far from achieving from this trend. Lack of enthusiasm, trust and loyalty are the major obstacles for successfully deploying IHPs in developing countries. Therefore, IHPs need to focus more on user-centric web portals in which patient demands are considered. IHPs are positioned in a very complex network where social and technical actors are equally important. Prior research on dimensions of electronic service quality (e-SQ) have only focused on technical issues. However, based on socio-technical reasons today IHPs positions in a heterogeneous network, social and technical are equally important in the network. This research is a conceptual paper therefore; the main aim of this research is to demonstrate the ability of integrating Actor-network Theory (ANT) into current e-SQ model and dividing dimensions of e-SQ into two categories: namely, human and non-human (social and technical). Future Research on Dimensions of E-Service Quality in Interactive Health Portals: The Relevancy of Actor-Network Theory