A Study on Service Innovation in Hospitals:Integrated Viewpoint on Medical Ethics and Customer Value

Abstract

[[abstract]]In researches literatures related to hospital management in recent years, most mainly focus on the issues of medical service and management, healthcare systems, medical disputes, medical care and medical history, with few investigating the service innovation in hospitals. Therefore, with the five integrated viewpoints on medical ethics and customer value, this study aims to investigate the connotation, types and development course of the service innovation in hospitals. After summarizing and analyzing the literatures, it obtained the five viewpoints: ethical value, functional value, happy value, relationship value and situational value. Based on the largest 150 hospitals in the number of outpatient and inpatient services points and registered points, this study adopted the single-industry case-oriented qualitative research method to select a total of 60 hospitals as cases study from all 20 medical centers, and 20 largest regional hospitals and 20 local hospitals. Through secondary data collection and in-depth interviews, this study totally collected 536 innovation events to form the case database, and conducted data analysis according to type comparison, interpretation construction, time series analysis and program logic model based on using each innovation event as an analysis unit. The study findings obtained are as below: (1) 18 innovation types (which including 48 sub-types) are obtained from further analysis based on the five integrated viewpoints; (2) In terms of the hospitals’ operation and development, their service innovation takes “functional value” as core value, supplemented by “situational value” and “relationship value”. In innovation types, the medical service takes the highest proportion, followed by friendly medical environment creation, international relation, E- technology service and R& D services in sequence; (3) The hospital with larger hierarchy scale pays more attention to the sustainable development of functional value, and the hospital with smaller hierarchy pays more attention to the development of relationship value, and the innovation services respectively develop their own unique pattern due to the different regions; (4) There is an E-technology trend in the development of medical industry connects with outside relations (such as governments, cross-industries and Industry-academia, etc.); (5) The government policies and systems affect the development course of our country’s medical service innovation