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This paper considers some implications of recent developments relating to patient safety for understandings of trust in health care contexts.

Conceptual analysis focusing on patients' trust in health care providers and health care providers' trust in patients.

Growing awareness of the scale of the problem of iatrogenic harm has prompted concerns that patients' trust in health care providers may be threatened and/or become inappropriate or dysfunctional. In principle, however, patients' trust may be both well placed and compatible with current understandings of safety problems and efforts to address these. Contemporary understandings of patient safety suggest that, to be deemed trustworthy, health care providers should make vigorous efforts to improve patient safety, be honest about safety issues, enable patients to contribute effectively to their own safety, and provide appropriate care and support after safety incidents. Patients who trust health care providers need not be ignorant of patient safety problems and may be vigilant in the course of their care. Iatrogenic harms do not necessarily reflect breeches of trust (not all such harms are yet preventable), and patients who are harmed might in some circumstances appropriately forgive and resume trusting. Health care providers may feel vulnerable to patients in several respects. From their perspective, trustworthy patients will act competently to optimise the outcomes of their health care efforts and to preserve health care providers' good reputations where those are justified. Providers' trust in patients may strengthen patients' trust in them and facilitate safety improvement work.

Shows how, in principle, trust can be compatible with current understandings of patient safety issues and may enhance efforts to improve patient safety.

One of the most affected groups during the COVID-19 pandemic was health-care providers due to the direct and continuous exposure to the virus and a lack of sufficient medical equipment. Palestinian health-care providers were exposed to several challenges related to their work environment as they worked in war-like conditions; therefore, this study aims to explore health-care providers’ perceptions, perspectives, challenges and human rights-related concerns during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Palestine.

The sample comprised 30 health-care providers 26–35 years, who were purposively selected from among health-care providers in two Palestinian cities, Nablus and Tulkarm, located in the north of the West Bank. Thematic content analysis was applied to transcripts of interviews with the practitioners to identify key themes.

The thematic content analysis showed that the pandemic and quarantine negatively affect the mental health outcomes, daily routine and social relations of health-care providers. The main challenges related to human rights violations and faced by the health-care providers include a lack of sufficient infrastructure, lack of medical equipment’s and protective gear, military occupation and a shortage of health-care providers in general, especially those who practice in speciality fields such as neurology, oncology, pediatric surgery and clinical psychology.

Further investigations are recommended to test different variables related to health-care providers’ work during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper also recommends conducting studies targeting Palestinian health-care providers’ training and supervision services to improve their skills and resiliency in dealing with future crises.

The present work is the first to examine health-care providers’ perceptions, perspectives, challenges and human rights concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic in Palestine. This novel sample resides in a political and social environment characterized by high environmental stressors due to decades of military and political violence (e.g. militarization, poverty, lack of employment opportunities, cultural pressures, human rights violations, etc.)

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of the utilization, attitudes, and concerns of health care consumers and providers about biometrics.

Data were analyzed from a survey of 324 adult subjects, including 167 “health care consumers” and 157 “healthcare providers.”

Health care providers were found more accepting of biometric technologies than consumers, a finding that seems to follow from more familiarity and experience with those technologies. Feelings about the potential uses and limitations of biometrics were found to be more differentiated among providers than consumers. Yet, concerns about privacy and the need for information limits were identifiable as important feelings among providers and consumers alike. Finally, demographic characteristics only weakly to modestly distinguished concerns about privacy and confidentiality among health care consumers and providers.

The findings reported here suggest the need for additional research into the types of biometrics adopted in diverse health care settings and into the nature of innovators or early adopters.

If biometrics is to gain acceptance, there seems to be a need for different promotion strategies for providers and consumers. Also, concerns for personal privacy will need to be considered.

This paper fills an important gap in understanding the uses, feelings, and concerns about biometrics among health care consumers and providers.

The purpose of the study was to empirically validate the linkages between IoT adoption and how it overarched influenced the patient care service engagement. This contributes to the body of knowledge and helps hospital managers to understand the relationship and relevance of IoT adoption; otherwise healthcare sector are late movers towards technology adoption. This gives a nuanced framework towards establishing empirically validated framework which will motivate healthcare services providers to be motivated to adopt and implement IoT enabled care delivery. The physician patient interaction and alignment during decision making will foster positive word of mouth, superior care service and reduce extra overheads for healthcare providers without compromise or rather with increment in service delivery proposition.

The study theoretically and empirically describes that with the adoption of internet of things (IoT) devices in health care, better services can be provided to patients by using partial least square – structure equation modelling-based robust technique and explains the better understanding of the health-care process with the help of information pervasiveness, physician-patient orientation and improved patient and physician involvement in the decision-making process.

This study shows that wearable IoT device adoption in health-care service delivery opens new opportunities and disrupts the conventional and traditional way of health-care service delivery by empowering the patient to take part in decision-making and enhancing their engagement in health-care service delivery.

The study might influence by generalizability. Perception-based cross-examination knowledge from the patient’s perspective. It is likely that patients who use these devices will grow accustomed to using them and become more capable of using them. Thus, time-series tests have not been used to catch enhanced skills. New patients’ experiences will be altered over time. Regardless, non-response bias and traditional process bias received excessive interest.

The study aims at unravelling how the adoption of IoT enabled practices and usage of IoT devices bolsters the available data points in the context of healthcare especially with respect to patient care delivery. The study conceptualizes and empirically validates how the usage of IoT interface enabled technology enables better patient treatment and caregiver participation. The study puts forth a nuanced understanding regarding how pervasively available ubiquitous care information fosters shared decision making. This study further emphasizes that importance of ensuring a reliable computing environment devoid of privacy and security risks. The study attempts at Emphasizing empirically how the enhanced information pervasiveness catapults the patient-provider interactions, through health data exchange. Highlighting the importance of search feature in cloud storage and recovery mechanisms. The study not only fulfills the overarching linkage between enhanced service engagement with IoT adoption, it provides a mental map and ready to refer framework for hospital and healthcare experts to refer to, which prescribes thar care providers must build new methods aimed at empowerment of patients to participate and take more inclusive role. This unique confluence between patients and physicians will unravel the sync; helping not only avoid costly decision errors, but also improve patient care delivery environment. Patients should be permitted to participate in decision-making,inspire patients to be participatory.

The study efforts to empirically investigate and discover the link between how wearable sensor-based IoT enhances health-care service engagement is underway. Using primary data this linkage validation allows the community and readers at large to gain a nuanced understanding of how superior interaction is enabled by a digital-health-care process with the help of IoT-enabled information pervasiveness, physician-patient orientation and empowered involvement.

The purpose of this paper is to address a critical problem for health-care organizations: patient referral leakage. This paper explores the nature of patient referrals by examining how health-care providers’ breadth and depth of connectivity within a hospital network and identification with each other influence the likelihood of future patient referrals.

The data was collected by using a multi-sourced data set from the health-care industry. The proposed model was tested by using logistic regression to determine the likelihood of a primary care physician’s (PCP) referral to a specialist within a hospital network.

A model linking provider connectivity to examine co-creation practices in the form of patient referrals is tested. Results indicate that patient referrals are multidimensional. A PCP’s likelihood to refer to a specialist within the hospital network is influenced by the breadth and depth of connectivity of each provider.

This investigation extends service ecosystems to patients, health-care providers and hospital organizations, making it the first to explore how different degrees of connectivity (breadth of referral partners and depth of exchange) between and among health-care providers influence the likelihood of future patient referrals. Findings complement extant literature on service ecosystems by empirically showing that provider relationships are interdependent and rely on the mutual coordination of benefits within the entire health-care organization and network.

Managers and health-care professionals can use the framework to build and strengthen relational ties/alliances within a service organization. An ecosystems perspective reduces patient referral leakage through enhanced organizational performance, competitive advantage and continuity of care.

The authors offer a novel view of referral relationships using hard-to-access proprietary data. Moreover, this study responds to the need for transformative service research by offering service researchers and policymakers a means to enhance consumer well-being. The main contribution of this study is a framework to gain a better understanding of patient referral relationships between employees (i.e., health-care providers) in an organization, thereby affording an opportunity to bolster operational efficiencies, improve clinical outcomes and strengthen referral pathways. By viewing health-care networks through a service ecosystems perspective, contextual boundaries and the relative power of relationships are also identified. The novel use of rarely available hospital data in this setting helps explain how patient leakage compromises the health of the ecosystem and its members.

Focusing on customization, this paper aims to examine how service providers market health care in emerging markets through medical tourism.

Using a qualitative method, researchers conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with managers from five health-care providers and supporting organizations in the Philippines. For analysis, data from the service providers are compared.

Customization is found to play crucial role in offering health-care services. The customization takes place by adapting to emotional, social and cultural needs; alleviating knowledge asymmetry; and moderating the negative impact of the unfamiliar context experienced by international patients.

The empirically grounded theoretical framework needs to be tested in different contexts for generalization.

The study focuses on understanding and responding to the needs of international patients, also demonstrating that health-care marketing must be developed through a joint effort by both the medical and business sides of health-care providers.

The paper acknowledges the need for health-care marketing and the novel role of health-care providers.

Using a marketing lens, this study sheds light on the underexplored industry of medical tourism.

Policy reforms to primary health care delivery in New Zealand required government-funded firms overseeing care delivery to be constituted as nonprofit entities with governance shared between consumers and producers. This paper examines the consumer and producer interests in these firmsʼ allocation of ownership and control utilising theories of competition. Consistent with pre-reform patterns of ownership and control, provider interests appear to have exerted effective control over these entitiesʼ formation and governance in all but a few cases where community (consumer) control pre-existed. Their ability to do so is implied from the absence of a defined ownership stake and the changes to incentives facing the different stakeholding groups. It appears that the pre-existing patterns will prevail and further intervention will be required if policy-makers are to achieve their underlying aims.

Exploding expenditure in health care has led to new reimbursement regulations forcing health care providers to conduct their organisations as business concerns. In order to be competitive providers have started to build networks that allow the delivery of interrelated health services in a well‐adjusted and uniform manner. However, besides strategic agreement, successful networking requires the support of information systems for efficient cooperation and process management in order to deliver efficient day to day service. With serviceflow management we provide a general concept that answers these needs. Based on modelling process patterns and the exchange of XML‐representations of process knowledge and data between service providers, serviceflow management supports organisations in jointly delivering services that cross provider boundaries. Furthermore, it enables flexible handling of processes, which is indispensable in health care. Based on a health care example, we explore the possibilities of serviceflow management and present a Web‐based prototype on the basis of our generic, four‐layered architecture.

This paper aims to use the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin to reveal new insights into the role and impact of social media in health-care settings.

With the help of Bakhtin’s constructs of dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia and carnival, the power and influences of the social media phenomenon in health-care settings, are explored.

It is apparent from the in-depth analysis conducted that there is a delicate balance between the need to increase dialogue and the need to safeguard public health, in the use of social media for health-related communication. Bakhtin‘s constructs elucidate this delicate balance and highlight the need for health-care providers that use social media to find the right balance between these competing communicational priorities.

This paper advances a nascent theoretical approach to social media research. By applying Bakhtinian ideas to consumer health informatics, this paper has the potential to open a new approach to theorizing the role of social software in health-care settings. Stakeholders in digital health will find this paper useful, as it opens up dialogue to further discuss the role of social media in health care.

The purpose of the present paper is to discuss organisational problems that occur in situations that are complex because the treatment of patients requires input from multiple health care providers, and to argue conceptually how to resolve these problems by using SCM practices.

First SCM, being related to settings where several companies contribute to the production of one particular product, will be discussed in general. Since patient care is about service provision, the next to be examined will be service supply chains. Subsequently, major challenges in patient‐oriented care provision follow in settings where several health care providers are involved, based on which opportunities for applying SCM in patient care will be presented.

Based on literature addressing country comparisons of patient experiences, four major problem categories are distinguished: communication, patient safety, waiting times, and integration. Although problems also occur within organisational boundaries, the steps from one provider to the next generally represent the weakest spots in a system of health care providers. By applying insights from SCM, these problems can be tackled.

Problems with communication and integration might well benefit from the nomination of care coordinators. Information gathering and processing, i.e. both the availability of medical records of individual patients and information on provider performance, has to be improved. Breaking down functional barriers between care “silos”, within health care providers as well as inter‐organisationally, is a necessary condition for enhanced patient‐centred integration. Policy should also stimulate the provision of more coordinated services, for example, through integral cost prices for separate diseases (“case‐mixed accounting”).

This paper contributes to the emerging literature on using industrial processes or applying business concepts in health care. More specifically, insights from SCM are presented that contribute to patient‐oriented integration in situations where patients' needs cannot be fulfilled by one single (type of) institute. A supply chain perspective on patient care, combined with cross‐functional and cross‐organisational teams, continuous integration practices, lead time control, and appropriate information technology, shows to be promising.