Unserved consumers’ perceptions of consuming and potential customership in digital health care services: Study in the context of internet therapies
Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The culture of health care services is going through changes, resulting in the continuous emerge of new health-related services. Also, the discourse of health has reached new dimensions, many of which are traditionally more familiar to the consumer markets. Thus, traditional roles and relationships of health service actors are changing, and the consumers are allocated with neoliberal assumptions of responsible, entrepreneurial citizens, who are able and willing to actively participate in co-creation of their state of health through digital service channels. The purpose of this study is to examine how these phenomena are perceived among currently underserved mental health consumers and whether they perceive the current services markets to meet their needs as consumers. The research is conducted in the context of internet therapies offered in Finland. This research relies on the existing literature on health care services, digital health consumption and consumer behaviour literature. As mental health can be defined as a delicate topic in society, mental health consumers are examined in the light vulnerable consuming literature. \n \nThis research is qualitative in nature and relies on the methodological assumptions of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). The data of this study is collected by semi-structured in-depth interviews and written texts from potential users of internet therapies. The data is further analyzed by the tradition of IPA research and data-based content analysis, in order to interpret the relation between the lived experiences of individuals and the current phenomena occurring in health servicesscape. \n \nThis research increases our understanding on how consumers perceive customership in the health services market, and how they would perceive their role as customer in self-guided online mental health services. Finding both convergence and divergence with existing literature, this study shows that although consumers recognize the change in the health services culture, they do not perceive the current trends to be applicable to consuming mental health. This study suggests that there are two different contexts of digital health consuming, and that digitalization does not fully explain the phenomenon. Moreover, this study reveals that consumers have primary and secondary needs for mental health services and that many forms of digital services are perceived to prevent the fulfilment of the primary needs. Although consumers perceive digitalized mental health services as a possibility to serve the secondary needs, they perceive them as disempowering rateher than empowering until the primary needs are met. Digital services are perceived to lack adequate human attendance and to require too much autonomy. Thus, this study suggests that, in order enable the empowering possibilities of digital solutions, strategies to serve these customers must be developed. \n \nThe findings of this study contribute to consumer behaviour and services research literatures by increasing our understanding on the phenomena of current health discourse, consumer empowerment and consumer vulnerability in the context of health services. As this research also increases our understanding of the consumer perceptions and behaviour in the market, the findings may also be considered in managerial decision-making, like in services development and communication of digitalized mental health services.
Source: Aaltodoc (Aalto University)
Author: Henriikka Seittu
Language: English
Subfield: Health Information Management
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2954731286