Emerging Trends in User-Driven Healthcare
The purpose of this chapter is to explore transformations in market roles and relations that reflect collaborative, connective and communal characteristics among healthcare market actors, in light of technological advances and changing consumer-marketer institutional relationships. I exemplify how these transformations influence current market dynamics by providing a deep understanding of Web 2.0 applications in healthcare, specifically organizations that turn social networking into an enterprising virtual community in healthcare. In doing so, I explore how and why such systems develop and function, what makes patients and other actors in healthcare become a part of these systems, and how their interest and participation in these systems are maintained as they share their private health information and contribute to real-time medical research. Consequently, I suggest that current market dynamics in healthcare may be changing as a result of these systems utilizing social networking and engaging in reformation/reconstitution in the healthcare market.