With the pervasive nature of Internet-based technologies, healthcare services are undergoing significant transformation wherein both providers and consumers have access to information for making informed decisions yielding the best possible outcomes. On the one hand, providers are adopting or upgrading to state-of-the-art IT, aiming to improve organizational efficiency, access to care, and quality of care delivered, which lead to improved well-being for patients as consumers. For example, community-based behavioral healthcare providers have been adopting web-based innovations to enhance patient engagement and to help people with substance abuse and behavioral issues. These people otherwise may not have access to healthcare services or are reluctant to seek help in traditional channels for care. At the same time, the ongoing liberation of healthcare data to bring it into the public domain has energized technology vendors, healthcare systems, start-ups, and researchers to develop new applications, tools and products that can harness big health data to improve provider-level clinical decision-making. On the other hand, advances in technological solutions, such as mobile apps, are expected to empower consumers to interact with their care providers more effectively, engage in shared medical decision-making with providers, and access relevant information to manage their health better. Finally, innovative applications of information technology will have substantial impacts on improved management of the health of large populations of people and key social groups who are at risk, and also for improving public agencies’ capabilities for responding effectively to emergency situations.
This special issue of ECRA seeks to publish leading-edge research that investigates how technological and methodological advances are reshaping and transforming the healthcare sector. It will examine how recent and emerging technological and marketplace developments support innovative business and organizational models to meet the challenges of improved healthcare delivery.
This call for papers will yield one special issue that will be developed and co-edited by:
- Ajit Appari, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College,
USA, ajit.appari@dartmouth.edu - Xia Zhao, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA,
x_zhao3@uncg.edu
The sponsoring editor for this special issue is Robert J. Kauffman, ECRA’s Editor-in-Chief.
The special issue seeks analytical, empirical, experimental, and case study-based research that contributes to theory building, and should have practical implications. Interdisciplinary studies that are relevant to e-commerce in healthcare are especially welcome.
Relevant topics include:
- Challenges and opportunities in health information exchanges for healthcare services provision and population health
- Data-driven methods to improve healthcare service operations and patient treatment
- Economics of information security and privacy in healthcare services
- Electronic communities and online social networks for providers, patients and consumers
- Impacts of public and private infrastructure, and health info exchanges on the healthcare market
- IT-enabled mechanisms that improve the healthcare delivery process
- IT-enabled workplace wellness programs
- Market-based competition for online healthcare services
- Modeling coordination issues among healthcare stakeholders in the e-health record environment
- Roles of emerging technologies and infrastructure in healthcare, such as telemedicine, telemonitoring, and wearable devices
- Roles of IS in engaging patients in effective medical decision-making processes
- Roles of IS in improving healthcare service quality and reducing clinical errors
- Roles of IS in improving intraorganizational and inter-organizational clinical supply chains
The development window for this issue opens on September 15, 2012, and papers must be submitted no later than March 15, 2013. Authors are encouraged but not required to submit an extended abstract (of no more than three pages) to the Special Issue Editors as a means to gauge their interest and get suggestions on developing an effective paper. Papers will be assigned for review as they are received, and acceptance decisions will be made on a rolling basis over time, as appropriate to the development of high quality research for publication.
For further details on submission guidelines, review process, and publication details are available at: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/electronic-commerce-research-and-applications/call-for-papers/si-on-ehealth-and-healthcare-service-transformation/.