Democratizing Healthcare: Opportunities for Value Creation through Patient Feedback Platforms
Résumé
As emerging and rapidly expanding phenomena, various patient feedback platforms are developing in the healthcare industry, allowing patients to express their opinions on their care journey. The primary focus of the studies on these platforms is their value creation potential for patients or doctors (including downsides, e.g., bad press for doctors, erroneous information). Only a small and emerging group of studies seeks toidentify the value creation of feedback published on these digital platforms for the healthcare ecosystem in general, including public and private hospitals with varying degrees of inter-organizational rivalry (including nonexistent). This paper contributes to this latter group by investigating the value creation potential of the patient feedback platforms for hospitals. Based on an in-depth analysis of the negative feedback about a hospital on an emerging patient feedback platform in France, our main results outline the strategic but insufficiently used raw data accessible to any hospital on these platforms. Our results respond to previous calls to explore digital technology that facilitates the shift toward patient-centric care. Finally, we argue that digital patient feedback platforms are knowledge brokers between hospitals and their patients but more interestingly between hospitals and the patients and/or managers of competing hospitals.