Designing Mobile Applications for Healthcare Professional Use: A Service Marketing Perspective

Abstract

The investigation of health services is a major area of interest within the field of marketing (e.g. Berry and Bendapudi 2007; Crié and Chebat 2013). Research in the area is heterogeneous, covering the range from healthy individuals, people suffering from chronic diseases along with healthcare professionals. In previous studies, there is inherently an assumption that medical applications have the potential to improve the efficiency of healthcare service delivery and thereby deliver value to consumers, hence generate uptake. However, thousands of consumer-oriented applications have close to zero downloads (Campaign 2014), and the acceptance of medical applications is relatively low by professionals in the hospital context (Wu et al. 2011). This suggests a need to inform the service design cycle for medical applications with insights from technology and design disciplines in order to deliver relevant mobile services. In the contemporary ‘electronic’ marketplace, encompassing all aspects of service delivery in design appears daunting. Yet, it is crucial to identify those factors that drive positive service experiences in order to maximize consumer value (Sandström et al. 2008). A large and growing body of services research investigates the role of consumer perceptions of value creation as a driver for acceptance, use and/or purchase. S-D logic suggests that ‘value is defined by and co-created with the consumer rather than embedded in output’ (Vargo and Lusch 2004). When value is perceived as value in use, functional and economic benefits as well as emotional, social, ethical and environmental dimensions are of significance for consumers (Grönroos and Voima 2013). As a result, if the full potential of mobile services is to be realised in medical care, it is necessary to understand the interplay between technology issues, such as usability and the human side of assessments of experience in the creation of value for the user. We posit that optimal mobile service design could be achieved by using human–computer interaction design principles in conjunction with service design theories. The purpose of this chapter is to extend existing studies by investigating consumers’ perception of value in using mobile services in context and explore how medical service design and delivery can be optimised for mobile applications. To address these objectives, we follow an inductive approach aligned with grounded theory techniques and procedures (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Strauss and Corbin 1998), and we initially employ an exemplar case study. We report on data concerning a medical mobile application (Mersey Micro) for healthcare professionals intended for use inside the hospital. Data are gathered from in-context, in-depth, interviews with representative users, usability studies as well as an exploratory survey aiming at identifying clinicians’ interaction with the mobile application. The literature suggests that design of effective and efficient healthcare systems would benefit greatly from integrated models and frameworks that combine consumers’ emotions and technical features of service platforms (Ostrom et al. 2010). As a result, this chapter might be seen as an initial attempt towards this direction. Our initial findings are pointing the direction of (medical) mobile service design as a combination of technology issues, such as usability and the human side of assessments of experience in the creation of value for the user. References available upon request.