IT-based Capabilities, Service Innovation, and Quality in Health Care

Rapid advancements in information technology (IT) and changing consumer requirements are forcing organizations to move from a product-based economy to a service-based economy. Tremendous opportunities await organizations that set themselves apart from their competition through service innovation. One industry which traditionally lags behind in the using IT to effectively deliver services is health care. Successful application of IT in health care could facilitate service innovation by creating new business models that redefine the traditional relationships between providers and patients. Increased data availability and transparency can bring data and process driven methods to improve health care service delivery. In this study, we examine theoretically and empirically the role of “service” in health care. Specifically, our research questions are: “what is the role of IT-based capabilities in health care facility performance?”, and “what roles do service innovation and quality play in mediating the relationship between IT-based capabilities and health care facility performance?

Healthcare service innovation based on information technology: The role of social values alignment

The electronic personal health record (ePHR) is an information technology (IT) de- signed for patients’ empowerment in health self-management. Its actual implementation remains less than expected due to two main barriers that must be addressed by ePHRs’ providers: lack of trust in providers with regards to data privacy and lack of flexibility of the tool. In this study, we suggest that to potentially overcome these two challenges, ePHRs could be provided by health cooperatives (co-ops) in collaboration with open source devel- opment communities that share similar values. Based on the concept of social alignment that focuses on values, we explore the potential social bi-alignments between the values underlying the mission of health co-ops and the purpose of ePHRs, and between the founda- tional values of health co-ops and open source development communities. We also explore the effect of such potential social values alignments on health co-ops’ interest in innovat- ing with an ePHR-based service. To achieve our research objectives, 17 interviews were conducted in health co-ops in Quebec, a province of Canada where the network of health co-ops is particularly active. Our findings show that the concept of social values alignment is useful in the context of ePHR-based service innovation in health co-ops. However, our data analysis shows that social values alignment is not sufficient for healthcare service innovation to happen. Indeed, our findings lead us toward the concept of organizational readiness to better understand what is required to increase the likelihood of ePHR-based service innovation in health co-ops. This study culminates with the undertaking of theo- retical development where we propose a conceptual model of IT-based service innovation in healthcare organizations by expanding on our findings and on insights from the liter- ature

A Procedure for Measuring and Validating a Construct of Service Innovation Capability Maturity

Service organisation success is not the result of discrete service innovations and should be attributed to the capability underpinning the repeated and continuous generation of these outputs, labelled service innovation capability (Pöppelbuß et al., 2011; Lillis et al., 2015; Nada and Ali, 2015; Hariandja, 2016). However, this capability is poorly understood and there is no mechanism available to organisations for evaluating their performance or identifying areas of strength or weakness (Hogan et al., 2011). This is a consequence of inadequate systematic effort devoted to methodological issues in this domain, where existing measures fail to follow established procedures in their development or measure the effectiveness, or maturity, of this capability (Tuominen and Anttila, 2006; Kohler et al., 2013). In response, this paper nominates a solution, describing comprehensive, best practice guidelines for the development and validation of a measure of the maturity of service innovation capability (MacKenzie et al., 2011)