New forms of communication of hyper-social organizations: an overview of European Hospitals
Abstract
Purpose of the research – Social media tools are becoming an important presence in healthcare. This paper analyses together social media and health, to address the question of how social networks may, with knowledge sharing to patients, doctors, health care stakeholders, provide a new vehicle of communication. The purpose of this paper is to explore, with a conceptual approach, how social media can develop new communication processes, both in the operator-user relationships and in the operator-operator relationships. Today, social media open new organizational scenarios also in the healthcare systems, which announce important changes in managerial imperatives, structures, processes and organizational cultures; that is new systems that have to be able to penetrate in emotionality of persons (Normann, 2006). Social media allow an instant sharing of ideas, opinions, knowledge and experiences, creating a new “space-time” dimension that would translate in a new way (additional) to "cure" the patient (Hawn, 2009).The health care organizations, complex adaptive systems, have to become open and collaborative systems, capable of developing deep partnerships with patients, their families and the community benefits from offered services, improving thus the effectiveness and efficiency of medical care. To achieve this, it is necessary to create places, especially virtual, where new “distinctive” knowledge is created, a knowledge that spreads through relational assets that are established between the human components. Theoretical background - Starting to the idea that the ambiguity related to legal and ethical issues (for example patient privacy) of social media contains the enthusiasm related to the potentialities that they offer, we have develop an overview of six European countries to bring out the real use of social media in Hospitals. Considering that "the key to success is the intelligent use of the relationship with the customer" (Normann, 2000:22), this paper investigates the perception of the use of Facebook by patients and doctors and, in particular, it explores Facebook users' awareness of the perceived benefits and if these will outweigh the observed risks. We apply a method, based on difference measurement (Krantz et al., 1971; Roberts, 1979) , fitted on the perceptual preferences of patients and doctors of Facebook communication. The Maximum Difference Scaling (MDS) was adopted for developing an unidimensional scale of benefit or drawback importance. It is a research method (Chrzan &Golovashkina, 2006), which analyzes both the best and the worst choice from a list containing multiple items. A set of items to be investigated was selected and we have presented the sets one at a time to respondents. In each set, the group was asked to examine the most salient or important attribute (the best) as well as the least important (the worst). Ratings of each item were esatablished on a five-point scale of Extremely Important, Very Important, Somewhat Important, Not Very Important, and Not at All Important. The group was asked to select the pair with the largest perceptual difference (Maximum Difference). MDS requires an experimental approach where each item is shown at least three times (Orme, 2005). The data were collected through a pilot project at the european level, which involved 30.000 (5.000 for each country) people, including doctors, members of different health care organizations, and patients. Research gap. The pilot project, starting from the existing data in the literature on the use of virtual communication and of social networks in health care organization, brings to light the fact that today health care organizations are using Facebook as a showcase, without exploiting its true potential. The paper identify to what extent European hospitals use social media and if the use of social networks such as communication systems in health care organization improves t
Anno di pubblicazione
2015
ISSN
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ISBN
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Numero di citazioni Wos
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Numero di citazioni Scopus
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Settori ERC
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Codici ASJC
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