Editors’ Introduction to the Special Section on Patient-centered e-Health: Research Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

We initiated the CAIS Special Section on Patient-Centered e-Health (PCEH) to provide support for the PCEH discipline, which has recently emerged to meet the practical need of supporting patients in managing their health. Because there are significant challenges in designing, developing, and using PCEH applications, there are many opportunities for IS researchers to study familiar topics, but in the very different healthcare delivery context. As an emerging discipline, PCEH is struggling with reconciling ambiguous definitions across studies, defining the discipline boundaries (how they overlap and are distinct from related research areas), and developing the exemplary research studies that can guide future research. Thus, the goal of this Special Section, as far as possible, is to gather a set of research articles that will move the PCEH discipline forward by providing resources and examples to support future PCEH research that is theory-based, is focused, and can build a cumulative literature and research tradition. In this Introduction to the CAIS Special Section, we argue that IS researchers are especially well-equipped to undertake PCEH research and thereby overcome the many challenges unique to PCEH study. We discuss the challenges in the emerging PCEH discipline and present approaches that IS researchers might take to meet these challenges and produce the exemplary studies needed to further the discipline. Our arguments and observations are supported by the fourteen articles that make up the Special Section. These fourteen articles represent four areas of emerging PCEH research, namely PCEH and the Healthcare Delivery Context; Models of Acceptance, Use, and/or Outcomes; Patient-centered Design Research; and Assessment of PCEH websites.

Re-Infrastructuring for eHealth: Dealing with Turns in Infrastructure Development

“…We have used the term re-infrastructuring to signify the activities for facilitating new logics when social and technological networks with long reaches are already in place and are leveraged for the instigation of novelty. Investigating the challenges of reinfrastructuring is especially relevant to the ongoing patient-oriented movement within healthcare (Wilson and Strong 2014). The re-orientation of existing infrastructural arrangements towards the patients is an effort that aims to reconfigure the inner workings of healthcare.…”

Untitled

“…In overview, the special issue papers focus on patients, special-purpose health IT, and nonclinical settings. This focus seems appropriate because these characteristics-especially the use of IT by patients in nonclinical settings-represent a major transition accompanying increasing "patient-centeredness" that is emerging in health IT (Wilson & Strong, 2014). We also note reasonable diversity of the papers across the octants, which suggests that our application of the human-technology innovation framework to health-HCI research provides a useful method of categorization.…”

“…The concurrent growth of research interest in HCI and health-IS topics has led to focused publication opportunities where the two areas overlap, including a special section in Communications of the AIS on patient-centered e-health (Wilson & Strong, 2014) and this special issue in THCI on HCI in health and wellness (we refer to HCI research on health topics hereafter as health-HCI research). Because publication is an important "currency" for scholars, it is valuable for health-HCI researchers to understand publication trends in their topic area to identify potential publication opportunities and to pragmatically evaluate constraints that may limit where they will be able to publish their completed manuscripts.…”

Expectant mothers’ value drivers at the maternity hospital: evidences from a monocentric study.

“…Different studies relate the patient experience to two main domains: the physical ambience and the human interactions (18). It is also common to consider patient experiences as an indicator of the quality of a speci c hospital (19,20) as experience evaluation is a fundamental instrument to be able to reach expectations (21,22): "bright and beautiful lobbies, rooms with big windows and access to outdoor gardens, dining options and innovative hospital designs have changed patients' experiences and expectations of what a hospital should be" (23). Research has shown new designs and amenities in a hospitals positively affect patient satisfaction (24), improve therapeutic bene ts (25), reduce pain and allow a shorter hospital stay (26).…”

“…Studies in the healthcare setting have provided some evidence that hospitals' service quality has a positive in uence on patient satisfaction (30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36), it means that healthcare providers should adopt a marketing approach to deeply understand patients' needs and expectations in order to meet them (37). In fact, it is argued that patients' opinions should supplement traditional indicators of quality in the healthcare domain (19,20) because they provide information on the ability to meet expectations (21). Scienti c literature highlights several elements of patient experience, which largely in uence the perceived quality of care.…”