Importance of technological platform on the perception of customers in hospitals: a systemic review

Abstract

This study envisages the effect of technological platform on the perception of internal and external customers, especially in healthcare organizations. The relevance of this study emphasis perspective changes of customers while using technological platforms in services. It is due to the differences in the following aspects - organizational values, administrative controls over operational activities, proactive practices in treatments, competitiveness in diagnosis, distinctiveness in services, sustainability features in practices etc. The operational activities of a healthcare system vary with nature and values of various categories of hospitals like private, corporate, government, mission etc. For attracting customers and making easiness in services, hospitals are adopting technological modules like pre-consultation work-ups, health packages, automated answers to enquiries, automatic inter-departmental references, scheduled services etc successfully implemented by other categories. The systemic reviews of literatures illustrate that adopting new technological platforms are able to make changes in performances but there are chances to differ the performances from customer’s perception. This analysis includes systematic reviews and meta-analysis. For consistency and validity, a standardized protocol was carried out in data collection, extraction, and quality testing. According to the data, the willingness of customers to return to a hospital for further needs or proactively refer other customers to the same organization determines its effectiveness of services. The conclusive part of the study envisages a) Customers have a natural ability to perceive the services in comparison to the organization's declared values b) Customers' mindset prepares them to receive the services according to their degree of need (stated or implied) c) Healthcare organizations are structured in a way that the output of a subsystem is the input of another, and so on; therefore any technological changes or the improvement in any process can have a sequence of challenging effects in the perception of the customers. d) The technological platforms used by the organization can influence the outcome of services received and the sustainability of the organization e) Several unforeseen factors such as social alienation, employee turnover, price fluctuations, etc. are also forcing healthcare organizations to adopt different platforms and cultures to provide the services in a cost-effective manner and it causes the greatest compatibility challenge in the perception of customers.