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Leveraging information technology (IT) to improve the treatment and support of patients is a widely studied topic in healthcare. For chronic diseases, such as diabetes, the use of information technology is even more important since its effect extends from a clinic environment to patients’ daily life. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of one widely adopted information technology, the mobile phone, on diabetes treatment, specifically on the complicated process of patients’ health, emotions and compliance.

We leverage a unique longitudinal dataset on diabetes patients’ health status in rural areas of China to study the problem. We also cross-link the dataset with mobile carrier data to further differentiate mobile phone use to phone calls and network use. To address the endogeneity concerns, we apply PSM and a series of instrument variables.

We identify clear evidence that mobile phone use can significantly improve patients’ emotions and compliance, where the effect is generally larger on patients in worse health conditions. While mobile phone calls clearly benefit diabetes patients, we do notice that mobile phone network use has a negative moderating effect with patients’ health condition on improving compliance.

This study not only enriches our theoretical understanding of the role of mobile phones in diabetes management, it also shows the economic benefit of promoting patients’ use of mobile phones, which should be considered by medical care providers and medical policymakers.

Contrary to want-based services, customer participation has got lesser attention in high-credence services like health care. Customer participation for patients with chronic illnesses could be life-threatening and goes beyond the service organization’s physical environment. Realizing the importance of transformative service research in health-care services, this study aims to propose and validate the conceptualization of customer participation for patients with chronic illnesses.

The study uses sequential exploratory research design with mixed method research. The first phase is a qualitative exploration of the nature and meaning of customer participation by synthesizing theory and insights from semi-structured interviews (N = 75) with doctors, patients and paramedical staff. Next, survey data (N = 690) of patients with chronic illnesses is used to validate the proposed conceptualization. Finally, nomological validity was also tested on an additional survey data set (N = 362) using SEM and FsQCA.

The findings reveal that health-care customer participation is a three-dimensional behavioral construct in which a customer can participate by sharing information, involving in decision-making and ensuring compliance. The study also demonstrates that customer participation is a critical driver of satisfaction with life and perceived control on illness.

The research provides policy guidelines for owners and operators of health-care organizations in developing frameworks for collecting participation data, which can be used in strategies for seeking customer participation.

The research conceptualizes and validates “customer participation” as a multidimensional higher-order construct for patients with chronic illnesses, rarely focused in services marketing and management research on health care.

The environment in which users acquire medical and health information has changed dramatically, with online health communities (OHCs) emerging as an essential means for accessing health information. It is imperative to comprehend the factors that shape the users' compliance willingness (UCW) to health information in OHCs.

This study adopted the information adoption model (IAM) and theory of planned behavior (TPB) to investigate the influence of argument quality (AQ), source credibility (SC) and subjective norms (SN) on UCW while considering the two types of online health information – mature and emerging treatments. The authors conducted an explanatory-predictive study based on a 2 (treatment types: mature vs. emerging) * 2 (AQ: high vs. low) * 2 (SC: high vs. low) scenario-based experiment, using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

SC positively influences AQ. AQ, SC and SN contribute to information usefulness (IU). These factors positively affect UCW through the mediation of IU. SN were found to improve UCW directly. Moreover, the moderating effect of SC on AQ and IU was more substantial for emerging treatments.

The research model integrates IAM and TPB, considering information types as an additional variable. The approach and findings provide a valuable explanation for UCW to health information in OHCs.

To better understand the reality of living with the diseases and conditions that its drugs and therapies are developed to treat, the Novartis leadership determined a need for more meaningful insights into patients’ lives. They sought to develop a systematic, creative methodology – informed by the psychology of insightful rather than analytical thinking – to properly integrate and deploy the research commissioned into its day-to-day business decision-making. For it is well established that better understanding of the patient reality drives both compliance and adherence “beyond the pill”. The purpose of this paper is to bring the novel methodology of creativity to a wider audience and ensure that many others – notably in patient advocacy organizations – can benefit from this approach.

A core team of Insight and Analytics and Patient Engagement leads from various therapeutic area teams worked in partnership with a psychologist and practitioner in the field of insightful thinking, to develop an effective methodology that could reliably surface and articulate genuine patient insights. This methodology – the i4i Insights Discovery™ process – was developed, piloted, refined and codified in 2020 and implemented across the company in 2021–2022. It uses a combination of convergent and divergent thinking techniques – human rather than artificial intelligence, combining diverse research outputs – to understand patients’ lives better. With enhanced understanding, the insights then shape educational and behavioral strategies to drive adherence and compliance.

At a time of tightening budgets and demands to deliver enhanced impact from research budgets, i4i Insights Discovery™ has enabled Novartis teams to turn existing research outputs into profound and useful understandings of what it means to live with specific diseases and develop evidence-based patient engagement strategies; insight-driven decision-making around the lifecycle of any compound. i4i Insights Discovery™ has been applied across Novartis’s diverse areas of expertise, from heart disease to cancer, from organ transplantation to dermatology, from food allergy to ophthalmology.

The i4i Insights Discovery™ process enables Novartis teams to gain deeper understanding of patients’ lives without the need to commission additional research; to do more with less. These insights enable cross-functional Novartis teams to develop better-informed strategies that better address the needs of patients and their care partners, of health-care professionals and health-care systems. The team creating the process is looking to make the i4i Insights Discovery™ approach a gold standard of insight discovery, both for pharma and health care and in other categories, too.

The i4i Insights Discovery™ process is a practical, novel application of well-established principles in the psychology of insightful thinking to address a clear business imperative. By repurposing and reinterpreting existing research outputs using creative verbal and visual exercises, it delivers a more human and empathetic understanding of the patient reality. It moves teams from “So what?” – this is what the data mean – to “Now what?” – this is what we should do as a result.

Background: Compliance of patients with self-care practices is the mainstay of measures to manage diabetes. This study explored self-care practices of type 2 diabetes patients receiving insulin treatment in North-East Ethiopia.

Methods: The study employed an interpretive phenomenological approach using purposive sampling. The data were collected from 24 (11 males and 13 females) participants (July 2019 to January 2020) using in-depth interviews till theoretical saturation. The data were analyzed thematically and organized using QDA Miner Lite v2.0.8.

Results: The findings were categorized into: labeling diabetes, self-care maintenance experiences, recognition of symptoms, and mitigating mechanisms. The self-care maintenance practice of patients was linked with diet input preferences and the effectiveness level of insulin. What guides the self-care behavior was the patients’ preferentiality of strictly adhering to their preferred dietary inputs. Barley and wheat were the most common preferential and non-preferential inputs, respectively. The patients strictly adhered to insulin treatment because they found it effective. The most common hyperglycemia symptoms to be managed by taking an additional dose of insulin, were frequent urination, increased thirst, and their consequence (dehydration). Excessive sweating (initial), shivering (middle), and falling (final), respectively in severity, were the most common symptoms of hypoglycemia which were perceived to be treated with sweet snacks.

Originality: To our knowledge, this is the first research in Ethiopia to investigate the self-care experiences of type 2 diabetes patients receiving insulin using an interpretive phenomenological approach.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a well-established treatment with efficacy for several psychiatric disorders and has yielded promising yet mixed data showing reductions in craving for substance use. Patients with substance use disorders and comorbid depression may encounter obstacles to receiving rTMS in outpatient settings for treatment of depression. In turn, implementation of rTMS in residential substance use programs would greatly benefit those with comorbid treatment resistant depression. This paper aims to provide recommendations for implementing rTMS within residential substance use treatment centers.

Using PubMed, the authors conducted a narrative review of manuscripts using various combinations of the following search terms: rTMS, depression, substance use and substance use disorder. The authors read manuscripts for their methodology, outcomes and adverse events to synthesize their results, which correspond to their recommendations for patient selection, safely implementing rTMS in residential substance use facilities and optimal rTMS protocols to start with.

Advantages of this approach include increased compliance, monitoring and access to care. Recommendations to safely incorporate rTMS in residential substance use disorder treatment centers revolve around selection of patients eligible for rTMS, allowing for sufficient time to elapse prior to commencing rTMS, monitoring for signs of recent substance use or withdrawal and using rTMS protocols compatible with the therapeutic programming of a treatment center.

This paper details the challenges and benefits of implementing rTMS for patients with dual diagnosis and provides recommendations to safely do so. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is a novel and unpublished endeavor.

Understanding the outcomes of co-creation (CC) in healthcare is increasingly gaining multidisciplinary scientific interest. Although more and more service management scholars have pointed out the benefits of cross-fertilization between the various research fields, the literature on this topic is still scattered and poorly integrated. This study aims to summarize and integrate multiple strands of extant knowledge CC by identifying the outcomes of health CC and the determinants of these outcomes and their relationships.

A structured literature review was conducted per PRISMA guidelines. A total of 4,189 records were retrieved from the six databases; 1,983 articles were screened, with 161 included in the qualitative thematic analysis.

This study advances a comprehensive framework for healthcare CC based on a thorough analysis of the outcomes and their determinants, that is, antecedents, management activities and institutional context. Extant research rarely evaluates outcomes from a multidimensional and systemic perspective. Less attention has been paid to the relationship among the CC process elements.

This study offers an agenda to guide future studies on healthcare CC. Highlighting some areas of integration among different disciplines further advances service literature.

The framework offers an operational guide to better shape managerial endeavors to facilitate CC, provide direction and assess multiple outcomes.

This is the first extensive attempt to synthesize and integrate multidisciplinary knowledge on CC outcomes in healthcare settings by adopting a systematic perspective on the overall process.

The objective of this study is to examine developments in the discursive practice of non-financial reporting in the public healthcare sector. In doing so, the authors investigate how the main reform foci of productivity and quality are represented, with a specific focus on the patient.

Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA), the authors conduct a longitudinal study (2007–2018) of healthcare reporting foci across the five administrative regions responsible for public hospitals in Denmark. The study analyses sixty annual reports and draws on contemporary reform documents over this period. CDA enables a micro-textual analysis, combined with macro-insights and discussions on social practice.

The findings show complex webs of presentation strategies, but in particular two changes occur during the period. First, the patient is centred throughout but the framing changes from productivity and waiting lists to quality and dialogue. Second, in the first years, the regions present themselves as actively highlighting financial and quality concerns, which changes to a passive and indirect form of presentation steered by indicators and patient legislation enforced by central government. This enhances passivity and distance in healthcare regional non-financial reporting where the regions seek to conform to such demands. Simultaneously, however, the authors find a tendency to highlight very different local initiatives, which shows an attempt to go beyond a pure automatic mode of reporting found in earlier studies.

Responding to the literature on both healthcare and financial reporting, this study identifies novel links between micro-level texts and macro-level social practices, enabling insights into the potentially intertwined impacts of public-sector reporting. The authors offer insights into the complexity of the construction of non-financial reporting in the public sector, which has a wider impact and different intentions than private-sector reporting.

One of the recommendations in process-based cognitive therapies suggests that functional analysis created by the clinician should be supported by empirical data collected through daily sampling. It enables the computing of a dynamic network of psychological processes and symptoms supporting clinical decisions but also therapeutic progress monitoring. However, the experience sampling solutions available in the market do not enable the automatic creation of this kind of network; thus, the use of this approach in clinical practice is practically impossible without advanced statistical skills and significant time investment. The purpose of the present paper is to describes a protocol of a research project based on a participatory approach aiming to create a solution enabling therapists not only to set up a personalized daily sampling for their patients and collect the data but also providing a fully automated visualization of the network adapted for therapeutic purposes.

The project will require creating a platform for therapists where they can set up monitoring and receive dynamic networks visualization, creating an experience sampling application for patients connected to the platform and creating an optimal data visualization system that will enable therapists to accurately and quickly interpret the network. A series of participatory workshops, qualitative and quantitative studies are described.

The presented studies will enable us to evaluate the ergonomy of use of both platform and app in laboratory and ecological settings along with the evaluation of network interpretation accuracy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first participatory design protocol for creating a solution that might enable clinicians to use a dynamic network approach in their everyday clinical practice. The challenges and opportunities of creating this kind of mHealth solution are discussed.

The study aims to address a critical gap in existing healthcare payment schemes and care service pricing by recognizing the influential role of patients' decisions on self-management efforts. These decisions not only impact health outcomes but also shape the demand for care, subsequently influencing care costs. Despite the significance of this interplay, current payment schemes often overlook these dynamics. The research focuses on investigating the implications of a novel behavior-based payment scheme, designed to align incentives and establish a direct connection between patients' decisions and care costs. The primary objective is to comprehensively understand whether and how this innovative payment scheme structure influences key stakeholders, including patients, care providers, insurers and overall social welfare.

In this paper, we propose a game-theoretical model to incorporate the performance of self-management with the demand for healthcare service, compare the patient's effort decision for self-management and provider's price decision for healthcare service under a behavior-based scheme with that under two implemented widely payment schemes, that is, co-payment scheme and co-insurance scheme.

Our findings confirm that the behavior-based scheme incentives patient self-management more than current schemes while reducing their possibility of seeking healthcare service, which indirectly induces the provider to lower the price of the service. The stakeholders' utility under various payment schemes is sensitive to the cost of treatment and the perceived health utility of patients. Especially, patient health awareness is not always benefited provider profit, as it motivates patient self-management while diminishing the demand for care.

We provide a novel framework for characterizing behavior-based payment schemes. Our results confirm the need for modification of the current payment scheme to incentivize patient self-management.