No abstract

Today, the interaction between patients and Interactive Health Portals (IHPs) is one of the hot topics of ehealth domains. Online health care providers try to improve the quality of their online services to increase patients' attraction, trust and loyalty. Dimensions of e-service quality (e-SQ) in Interactive Health Portals (IHPs) are usually deployed in a heterogonous network where both human and non-human actors are equally important. Prior research on patients' attraction, trust and loyalty indicates that dimensions of e-SQ are merely technical. However, due to socio-technical reasons, social aspects of these dimensions are inevitable. Therefore, this research is aimed at evaluating the relevancy of Actor Network Theory in the e-SQ context, and accordingly proposing a new theoretical framework for IHPs.

No abstract

Today, the interaction between patients and Interactive Health Portals (IHPs) is one of the hot topics of e-health domains. Online Health Organisations (OHOs) try to improve the quality of their online services to increase patients' demand. However, Malaysian OHOs are far from achieving from this trend. Lack of enthusiasm, trust and loyalty are the major obstacles for successfully deploying IHPs in developing countries. Therefore, IHPs need to focus more on user-centric web portals in which patient demands are considered. IHPs are positioned in a very complex network where social and technical actors are equally important. Prior research on dimensions of electronic service quality (e-SQ) have only focused on technical issues. However, based on socio-technical reasons today IHPs positions in a heterogeneous network, social and technical are equally important in the network. This research is a conceptual paper therefore; the main aim of this research is to demonstrate the ability of integrating Actor-network Theory (ANT) into current e-SQ model and dividing dimensions of e-SQ into two categories: namely, human and non-human (social and technical).