Health technology innovations continue to revolutionize health care delivery but simultaneously challenge the design of services that do not marginalize human participation in the creation of value in the health care delivery process. This research recruited persons living with chronic disease to collaborate in developing information communication technologies (ICTs) conceived as a virtual reality game and web-compatible graphic novel intended to function as entertaining health education aids. The findings revealed a transformative potential for ICTs far beyond original expectations. The participants envisioned ICTs that integrate data from biophysical monitoring devices with personal narratives toward creating social platforms that empathically share a common and clear understanding of the physical, emotional, and sociocultural realities of living with chronic disease. Consistent with cultural trauma theory, the research conclusions focus on realizing the power of technology-enhanced narratives to build collaborative therapeutic communities and to provide impetus for affecting social change and action in health care systems.Medicine is remarkably conservative to the point of being characterized as sclerotic, even ossified. Beyond the reluctance and resistance of physicians to change, the life science industry (companies that develop and commercialize drugs, devices, or diagnostic tests) and government regulatory agencies are in a near paralysed state, unable to break out of a broken model of how their products are developed or Kelly Tian (ktain@uwyo.edu) is professor of marketing and sustainable business practice,
Access to health services affects the well-being of millions of consumers. Although the topic of health-related access is regularly featured in popular and academic conversations, these conversations primarily concentrate on objective or situational access factors. This research focuses instead on consumers’ subjective perception of access to better appreciate how personally experienced service availability and ease of access jointly determine consumers’ access perceptions. The authors find that perceived access to health services (PAHS) offers insight into the relationships between access, perceived health vulnerability, and overall health. Through scale development and a series of three theory-testing studies, this work demonstrates the close link between PAHS and perceived vulnerability (Study 1), connects this relationship to overall health (Studies 1–3), and establishes behavioral changes associated with access-vulnerability concerns (Study 2). Moreover, Study 3 finds evidence for a “muting” effect of health system distrust on the relationship between PAHS and perceived vulnerability as well as an “amplifying” effect of health motivation on the relationship between perceived vulnerability and overall health. Together, these studies illustrate PAHS’s relevance for explaining consumer vulnerability and overall health.
This article examines deviant marketplace behaviors that appear in marketing systems involving subsistence consumer merchants, and their beneficial and detrimental implications. Deviant marketplace behaviors are violations of social norms that often arise among subsistence consumer merchants facing conflicting normative goals and incompatible means for meeting such goals. Social and environmental factors that exacerbate such conflicts, common in bottom-of-the-pyramid marketplaces, are explored within a deviant behavior typology. The research uses ethnographic data gathered from subsistence consumer-merchants to illustrate ways in which deviant behavior can be beneficial or detrimental and the unique challenges that partnering with subsistence consumer merchants may entail. It also provides insights into what conflicting norms and deviance engender in marketing systems.
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic reduced real and perceived access to healthcare services, exacerbating pandemic fear, and thus influencing consumers' adoption of preventative health behaviors. Extending the EHBM, results from two studies show that perceived access to health services and pandemic fear impact an individual's general and COVID-preventative health behaviors. High perceived access reduces pandemic fear through its buffering effects on perceived health vulnerability and pandemic-related health system concern, especially with telehealth usage during the pandemic. While pandemic fear motivates COVID-19 vaccination, pandemic fear reduces personal preventative health behavior (e.g., healthy eating, exercising) and has little effect on personal COVID-preventative behaviors (e.g., wearing a mask, social distancing) when individuals perceive high pandemic-related control. Moreover, the fear-behavior link does not hold for preventative health visits; instead, perceived access directly promotes preventative visits and screening. This research informs public health stakeholders' communication, education, and resource allocation during health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.
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