Customer Empowerment in Healthcare Organisations Through CRM 2.0: Survey Results From Brunei Tracking a Future Path in E – Health Research

Abstract

IntroductionThe idea of customers' empowerment in healthcare emerged in response to the rising concern that customers or patients should be able to play a critical role in improving their own health. In traditional healthcare practices, a patient is the recipient of care as well as medical decisions. However, a paradigm shifthas taken place - that is, a change from patients who merely receive care to those who actively participate in their healthcare. This change emerged in the 1960s and has spread throughout the entire healthcare industry as a social movement characterised by the right to act based on informed choice, active participation, a self-help perspective, and full engagement in critical processes (Kieffer, 1984).Traditionally, healthcare providers have made most of the decisions on treatments. Indeed, the lack of participation of patients in healthcare processes was the main obstacle to the empowerment of patients as customers. Nevertheless, there will always be circumstances in which patients choose to hand over responsibility for decisions about their healthcare to providers due to the difficulty in selecting available options or the time needed to understand the health problem and the options. However, this does not undermine the proposition that customers' empowerment will promote efficiency and that decisions should also be made from the perspective of customers (Segal, 1998).The utilisation of information and communications technology (ICT), especially the Internet, in the healthcare sector is frequently referred to as electronic health or e-health. The main purpose of e-health is to improve healthcare management for the mutual benefit of patients and healthcare providers. One important aspect of e-health is how to manage relationships between a healthcare provider and its customers (patients) in order to create greater mutual understanding, trust, and patient involvement in decision making. Therefore, healthcare organisations are implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as a strategy for managing interactions with their patients (Anshari & Almunawar, 2012). The recent Web technology (Web 2.0) facilitates customers to generate contents to accommodate both patienthealth provider and patient-patient interactions. CRM enriched with the Web 2.0 (also called CRM 2.0) provides the capability for the intensive interactions mentioned above (Anshari, Almunawar, & Low, 2012). Besides, it can be considered a technology and strategy at the same time, raising hope for the advancement of e-health initiatives around the world.The main goal of this paper is to introduce a promising future research direction which may shape the future of e-health systems. In this paper, we examine customers' expectations concerning the process of empowerment through CRM 2.0 to make customers more proficient in dealing with their own healthcare issues. A preliminary survey regarding empowerment in e-health services was conducted in Brunei Darussalam (Brunei). The Internet density in Brunei is high with over 75 percent of the population having access to the Internet, and there is a very narrow digital divide in Brunei (AITI, 2010). Internet literacy in Brunei is high, and so are people's expectations to be empowered through e-health. However, it has to be noted that the development of e-health in Brunei is still in its infancy. The future developments within the scope of e-health services in Brunei should therefore significantly focus on patients' empowerment as one of the important features required by the people. The rest of this paper is organised as follows: the following section presents the background of the study, followed by the research methodology. We then discuss the results of the study in relation to a CRM 2.0 model we propose based on this investigation.Study BackgroundMany researchers have discussed the issue of empowerment in healthcare organisations. For instance, empowerment can be analysed from the perspective of patienthealthcare provider interactions (Dijkstra, Braspenning, & Grol, 2002; Paterson, 2001; Skelton, 1997; van Dam, van der Horst, van den Borne, Ryckman, & Crebolder, 2003), or from the point of view of the patient alone (Anderson et al. …