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The aim of this paper is to contribute a conceptualization of the information and communication needs of medical tourists from Western countries in an Asian health care context.

Multi-phase, semi-structured, in-depth interviews and observations were conducted with 27 multi-source informants who have communication experience in the international healthcare setting.

Multi-level information provision should be used to address communicative incongruence in Asian healthcare provider – Western patient encounters as was self-reported by the participants and observed by authors. The use of an informative communication model is proposed in order to facilitate interaction and the effective transfer of information with Western patients to overcome negative, underlying emotions and enable autonomous decision making by the patients.

This exploratory study is focused on Western patients and Asian practitioners in Thailand. Future research in other countries and with patients from other geographical areas could expand to generalize findings.

Fostering information sharing with Western patients by using an integrative communication model can improve patient satisfaction and health outcomes. The need for developing and implementing these improved practices for communicating with Western patients is reflected by the healthcare industry's current developmental trends helping to lead to a future of health service internationalization.

This is the first empirical study to provide insights concerning the communication needs and coping strategies of Western patients with Asian doctors in developing countries.

This study aims to examine relationships between corporate social responsibility (CSR) toward two key stakeholder groups – patients and society and hospital brand advocacy, and the mediating role of trust and patient-hospital identification (PHI) and the moderating role of hospital type on these associations.

The sample of 455 hospital patients was surveyed in Vietnam.

The results suggest that both CSR toward society and patients are positively related to brand advocacy. The influence of CSR toward patients on brand advocacy was stronger for private hospitals than public hospitals. Trust and PHI independently and partially mediate relationships between both stakeholder groups of CSR and brand advocacy with the exception of the trust, which fully mediates the relationship between CSR toward society and brand advocacy. Trust and PHI serve as serial mediators.

Hospitals can promote patients’ organic word of mouth through CSR initiatives and focusing on the reliability, safety and quality of care.

This study examines the mediation effects of trust and PHI and moderating role of hospital type in the relationships between two components of CSR effort and hospital brand advocacy.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus has become a major concern of Australian healthcare providers. From rates of barely more than 1 percent in the mid-90s, diabetes is now the leading cause of morbidity in the country. To combat the growing diabetes epidemic, Western Sydney Local Health District created the Western Sydney Diabetes (WSD) initiative. One of the key components of the WSD initiative since 2014 has been joint specialist case conferencing (JSCC). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the JSCC service including both individual- and practice-based changes.

The authors evaluated the JSCC program by conducting an analysis of patient-level data in addition to a discrete practice-level study. The study aim was to examine both the effect on individual patients and the practice, as well as acceptability of the program for both doctors and their patients. The evaluation included data collection and analysis of primary patient outcomes, as well as a survey of GPs and patients. Patient data on primary outcomes were obtained by accessing and downloading them through GP practice management software by GP practice staff.

The authors found significant improvements at both the patient levels, with reductions in BMI, HbA1c and blood pressure sustained at three years, and at the practice level with improvements in markers of patient management. The authors also found high acceptability of the program from both patients and GPs.

This paper provides good evidence for the use of a JSCC program to improve diabetes management in primary care through capacity building with GPs.

The learning outcomes are as follows: to gain insight into the importance of location, in terms of spatial and temporal context and the capability of leadership to tune into and strategically adapt to context; to understand and explain the sharing economy and explain how the Uber business model fits into this new way of doing business; to evaluate how Uber South Africa has adapted its business model in the period of the COVID-19 crisis and discuss the nature of the business model innovations that is has made; and to understand business model for sustainability and how it differs from the general understanding of business models.

On 15 May 2020, Alon Lits, General Manager of Uber Africa was considering his dilemma of adapting their business model to the demands of COVID-19, without losing their core business model as a multi-sided technology platform business. Uber was asking their riders to stay home to ensure social distancing during the lockdown, rather than booking a ride with Uber. The question was how they could support their driver partners, while they were discouraging riders to make use of Uber. Uber had taken initiatives to create additional revenue streams for drivers. The case highlights how Alon Lits and his executive team prioritised the health and well-being of their Uber community and quickly adapted their technology to meet the evolving needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. They customised their offerings to the different needs in the seven Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries in which they operated. Uber supported businesses by using the Uber-X sedan vehicles to deliver necessities like food, medicine and parcels to the frontline and poor communities. Uber globally offered their drivers in quarantine 14 days of financial assistance. Serving communities also involved offering free rides to women and children who were victims of domestic violence to get them to a safe space. The multi-sided platform technology business had to consciously adapt, to the “next normal” as the COVID-19 era evolved.

The case is most suitable for Post-Graduate Master’s level courses, MBA, MPhil in Corporate Strategy.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS: 11 Strategy.

There is an increasing interest in using information and communication technologies to support health services. But the adoption and development of even basic ICT communications services in many health services is limited, leaving enormous gaps in the broad understanding of its role in health care delivery. The purpose of this paper is to address a specific (intercultural) area of healthcare communications consumer disadvantage; and it examines the potential for ICT exploitation through the lens of a conceptual framework. The opportunity to pursue a new solutions pathway has been amplified in recent times through the development of computer-based ontologies and the resultant knowledge from ontologist activity and consequential research publishing.

A specific intercultural area of patient disadvantage arises from variations in meaning and understanding of patient and clinician words, phrases and non-verbal expression. Collection and localization of data concepts, their attributes and individual instances were gathered from an Aboriginal trainee nurse focus group and from a qualitative gap analysis (QGA) of 130 criteria-selected sources of literature. These concepts, their relationships and semantic interpretations populate the computer ontology. The ontology mapping involves two domains, namely, Aboriginal English (AE) and Type II diabetes care guidelines. This is preparatory to development of the Patient Practitioner Assistive Communications (PPAC) system for Aboriginal rural and remote patient primary care.

The combined QGA and focus group output reported has served to illustrate the call for three important drivers of change. First, there is no evidence to contradict the hypothesis that patient-practitioner interview encounters for many Australian Aboriginal patients and wellbeing outcomes are unsatisfactory at best. Second, there is a potent need for cultural competence knowledge and practice uptake on the part of health care providers; and third, the key contributory component to determine success or failures within healthcare for ethnic minorities is communication. Communication, however, can only be of value in health care if in practice it supports shared cognition; and mutual cognition is rarely achievable when biopsychosocial and other cultural worldview differences go unchallenged.

There has been no direct engagement with remote Aboriginal communities in this work to date. The authors have initially been able to rely upon a cohort of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people with relevant cultural expertise and extended family relationships. Among these advisers are health care practitioners, academics, trainers, Aboriginal education researchers and workshop attendees. It must therefore be acknowledged that as is the case with the QGA, the majority of the concept data is from third parties. The authors have also discovered that urban influences and cultural sensitivities tend to reduce the extent of, and opportunity to, witness AE usage, thereby limiting the ability to capture more examples of code-switching. Although the PPAC system concept is qualitatively well developed, pending future work planned for rural and remote community engagement the authors presently regard the work as mostly allied to a hypothesis on ontology-driven communications. The concept data population of the AE home talk/health talk ontology has not yet reached a quantitative critical mass to justify application design model engineering and real-world testing.

Computer ontologies avail us of the opportunity to use assistive communications technology applications as a dynamic support system to elevate the pragmatic experience of health care consultations for both patients and practitioners. The human-machine interactive development and use of such applications is required just to keep pace with increasing demand for healthcare and the growing health knowledge transfer environment. In an age when the worldwide web, communications devices and social media avail us of opportunities to confront the barriers described the authors have begun the first construction of a merged schema for two domains that already have a seemingly intractable negative connection. Through the ontology discipline of building syntactically and semantically robust and accessible concepts; explicit conceptual relationships; and annotative context-oriented guidance; the authors are working towards addressing health literacy and wellbeing outcome deficiencies of benefit to the broader communities of disadvantage patients.

This paper explores issues surrounding the under‐representation of people from the Gujarati community in mental health statistics and services in the UK and asks why people from the Gujarati communities are less likely to seek assistance for mental health problems. It is well known that members of the African‐Caribbean community are over‐represented in mental health statistics, and this is attributed to factors such as racial discrimination, social adversity and stress of migration. However, members of the Gujarati community have also been exposed to these hardships, but are not similarly represented in the mental health statistics. The paper explores a selection of the key literature. Two questions are considered: first, whether this group genuinely has very good mental health (and if so why); and second, whether there are any factors that hold members of this community back from seeking help.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the different kinds of health‐promotion activities undertaken by Chinese individuals in managing their disability from multiple sclerosis (MS).

The theory of control behavior was used in this study to understand the different kinds of primary and secondary health‐coping strategies used by participants and their impact on intra‐ and inter‐personal empowerments. Using semi‐structured interviews, interpretive phenomenology was used to elicit and analyze attitudes and behaviors of Chinese participants' management of MS.

Unlike previous studies which only emphasized the tangible aspects of physical health, the current paper suggests the importance of viewing health benefits in a more holistic manner. It was clear from the Chinese participants that “disability” and “healthy” were not viewed as two separate concepts. Being healthy does not mean an absence of disease but as role functioning, energy and vitality, social relationships, and emotional well‐being. The exploratory paper also found that empowerment outcomes involved an interaction of both the inter‐ and intra‐personal components and, at the same time, were driven by primary and secondary control‐related preferences.

Future research should include individuals with other disabilities and different demographic and socio‐cultural characteristics to confirm the generalizability of the findings uncovered here.

The impact of culture and contextual/situational variables on individual's choice of primary and secondary control strategies has important implications for developing health strategies across different ethnic minority groups.

The results provide support for the view that there are two dimensions to the process of patient empowerment. Rather than emphasizing primary control strategies, individuals can empower themselves by maintaining a balance between primary and secondary control strategies with respect to their health‐related goals.

Health care has become one of the paramount issues of the 21st century as governments and individuals grapple the complex problems associated with contemporary medical care such as cost, affordability, and shifting demographic trends. One response has been the growth of medical tourism (sometimes called health tourism or global healthcare). Medical tourism is an example of how the forces of globalization are re-shaping what has previously been a relatively stable localized service, medical treatment, in the face of changes to health care. While traveling to distant locations in search of health restoring locations is not new as the affluent have long traveled to spas or exotic locales to derive health benefits. What has changed is who is doing it and why they are doing it as insurers and patients alike become eager participants in the outsourcing of medical care. The rising number of uninsured and underinsured Americans, particularly in the middle class, has been coupled with effective marketing by medical tourism companies to produce growing numbers of Americans traveling to foreign countries for healthcare. China, India, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Africa, and Thailand are only a few of the competitors for overseas patients as a source for economic development. Using analytic frameworks of Immanuel Wallerstein and Anthony Giddens to provide a social analysis of this phenomenon yields an exploration of this trend.